


Wisp

by saizine



Category: Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Angst, Eventual Resolution, M/M, Miscommunication, Pining, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-13 12:40:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2151072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saizine/pseuds/saizine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kent doesn’t know when he started smoking; he doesn’t know when he stopped, either. It had never been a permanent thing. Just… intermittent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written between 06 July 2014 and 15 August 2014.
> 
> Possible spoilers: Set immediately following series 3. Disregards events of series 4. Includes canon characters introduced in series 4.
> 
> Again, thank you so much to **timethetalewastold** for betaing this fic! :)
> 
> Note about posting: there are five parts to this fic, which will be posted (daily) over the five days between 18 August and 22 August.

An inquest is not a trial; it is not to apportion blame. And yet, here they are, walking back out into the world with guilt heavy on their shoulders. Chandler leads, because he always does, with Miles a step behind at his shoulder. Riley and Mansell follow, heads inclined in quiet conversation. Kent brings up the rear with his hands preemptively buried in his coat pockets despite the heating in the coroner’s court, and he only hunches in on himself a little more as they file out through the heavy doorway and into the bleak outdoors.

If he’d been in charge, he would have had them straight back in the station, working on the next case. But it’s not his call and they mill about in the building’s small courtyard for some unknown, godforsaken reason. Pedestrians hurry past on the other side of a low brick wall, indistinct bulks of coat, unburdened; the witnesses that Kent’s just watched give testimony tread across the pavement with intent and appointments to keep. Morgan’s family stands in the lee provided by the columns of the main door, away from the biting wind. Kent stands in its path, buffeted as the grit gets in his eyes, and stands fast. What else can he do? What else can any of them do? It’s out of their hands. This is case closed. They never really close, he knows, but that’s the terminology and they’re supposed to look forward now, look towards the next, towards the ones they can still save.

Not that Kent’s sure they can even manage that anymore.

The day fails to inspire confidence: dull and grey although it’s just past lunchtime, clouds hovering overhead like some sort of ominous threat that will never come to pass. Even the small patches of grass are grey, hiding the pigeons as they peck at specks of nothing. It matches Kent’s mood—monochrome, drained. He’d half-hoped that the concrete answer might release him—them—from this state of mind, but no. It’s just a reiteration of what they’ve been telling themselves, dressed up in legalese and waving a coroner’s signature. Somehow that doesn’t make it any more or less true, any more or less convincing. It’s all the same. It doesn’t change the way they look at each other.

Kent glances over his shoulder and finds Chandler looking away, as usual. Kent’s not sure he sees much, these days, but he certainly looks.Miles and Riley hover nearby him, close enough to hear if anything in his head or heart cracks. Kent thinks they're too late; that's already happened, somewhere far away from the rest of them. Mansell’s messing with his phone, checking texts with an intensity that suggests he’s carrying on with one too many women again. They’re all standing there, hovering in a strange and distant shape, but Kent’s never felt more alone.

‘I’m going for a smoke,’ he announces, on an exhale. 

He doesn’t wait for a response. He doesn’t look back to see if any of them looked up, either; he keeps his gaze forward and on the no smoking sign that he only just passes before fishing the pack out of his inside pocket. Tearing into it feels as familiar as it had five years ago, even if he feels very far away from himself.

He holds a cigarette in his mouth and watches the flame lick warm light into the cradle of his fingers as the wind cools his knuckles; he considers checking his phone, but decides against it as he breathes out the first stream of smoke. If anything’s on it at all, it’ll just be Erica asking him how it went (badly) and if she should pick up an extra bottle of plonk on her way home tonight (probably). Except he can’t even be bothered to turn his mobile back on, let alone type a response, so instead he takes another drag and ignores the murmur of voices.

(They’ve noticed, then. Took them long enough.)

Rain patters on the end of his nose, his shoulders, threatens but doesn't start properly. He glares at the silver-grey sky and makes silent threats he knows are impossible to fulfill. He’s so engrossed in his wallowing, in trying to figure out how likely it is that the day will get even more shit, that he almost doesn’t notice that he’s being approached.

And, because it’s just his bloody luck, Kent only realises that it’s Chandler who’s walking towards him when it’s too late to think of anything to say. Not that they’ve managed to have a normal conversation since—God, have they ever had a normal one? Kent doesn’t want to think about it because it’s starting to dawn on him that it doesn’t matter since this is what it’s going to be like, now.

Chandler’s careful to arrange himself upwind. He’s doing what looks like his best to suppress a distasteful look, too, and he checks the ground around his feet as Kent flicks the ash away even though it went in the opposite direction.

‘Sir,’ Kent says, an acknowledgement instead of a greeting.

'I didn't know you smoked.'

‘I don’t.’ He’s well aware of the irony, even as he says it around the cigarette. 'Not regularly.'

That clarification doesn’t seem to have done any convincing. Chandler’s still looking at him like he’s holding a lit stick of dynamite and he’s probably going over every interaction they’ve ever had, trying to see if Kent’s bending the truth. He’s not, he doesn’t do that, and Chandler knows; it shouldn’t take him very long at all to think back through every case, every night at the pub, every do they’ve ever gone to as a team and realise that he’s never seen Kent unwrap the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes before. Except it does, and Chandler both looks at and through him with a confusion that makes Kent teeter between insult and intrigue.

'They're useful to carry around, anyway,’ he says, on a smoke-filled sigh, just for the sake of filling the silence. ‘Can get you in a witness' good books.'

Chandler tries a tense smile. ‘Very old school.'

'Hmm.' Kent could have sworn Chandler’s eyes linger on his mouth for a moment too long—though, given the circumstances, he can see why. 'And a lighter's more useful than you'd think.'

He doesn't mention that he'd bought a fresh pack specifically for today. He hasn't touched his last lot for months and when he'd gone looking it had disappeared. Probably Jack’s fault, he's always trying to impress his new girlfriend, and Kent’s bedroom door only locks from the inside. Either way he'd wanted the fallback, the backup of the packet in his pocket; he doesn't mention that he'd smoked after his exams, after his interview for the police, when Miles (only a newly familiar face back then) had told him he’d been recommended for CID. At least he could blame his jitters on the nicotine.

Every time, he just wants something to do with his hands. Something to focus on, something visceral rather than cerebral. He gets so sick of thinking when all thoughts lead to the same rotten conclusion. And he doesn’t dare try to explain it to anyone, because the last time he had the guy had scoffed, shot him a derisive look across the rucked bedding, and said ‘Nice try, but if that was true, that’d be a roll-up in your mouth.’ Kent hadn’t called back, not after that. He had thought about rolling his own once or twice, in passing. But he can’t be bothered with the faff of it all, tobacco and filter tips and Rizlas. It’s cheaper, he knows, but so’s smoking about three cigs a month. It all works out the same.

Much like everything in this miserable bloody world.

‘I suppose it could be,’ Chandler says, looking away from him, away from them both and down the road.

Kent’s almost forgotten what that reply’s supposed to be in agreement with. He’s been too busy watching Chandler’s neck out of the corner of his eye, the downturn of his mouth, the way he tucks his hands back into his pockets that in anyone else might suggest an imminent relaxation, a softening of his posture, but Chandler looks as statuesque as ever, as straight-backed and solid. It’s attractive, and Kent curses himself for thinking it; standing outside a coroner’s court in October on a day like this isn’t the time. It’s never the time, really, because he’s not supposed to think things like _He’s got a wonderful mouth_ about his superior officer on any given day.

But he does think that; he’s got a whole list of things stored in the back of his head, words he’s not going to allow his brain to string together in regards to Chandler again.

Except his self-control’s never bloody well worked, has it? 

‘Oi, you two,’ Miles barks, his voice raised to be heard over the passing traffic.

Both Chandler and Kent crane their necks to look in his direction at the same time; the skipper’s stood much where they’d all stopped when they’d filed out, fixing them with an expression that’s exasperated even at this distance. Kent makes a disgruntled sort of noise in the back of his throat and takes what he knows will be his last drag.

‘There’s still half of the day to finish,’ Miles continues as both Riley and Mansell turn to peer in their direction.

‘Right, skip,’ Kent says, casting smoke across his scowl. Chandler says nothing.

‘Try not to corrupt him, will you?’

Kent doesn’t dignify that with an answer. It’s probably insubordination—Miles is his directly superior officer, after all, and he reports to him first—but that’s just another in a line of things that don’t seem to matter that much anymore. He just tuts, drops the end of the cigarette to the pavement at his feet, and treads it into the pavement as he goes.

* 

‘Hey, Kent,’ Mansell calls from the next desk over, patting his pockets. ‘Couldn’t bum a cig, could I?’

The request’s punctuated by the wheezing bang of their ancient printer that had seen better days five years ago. Kent looks into the middle distance and sighs; Mansell’s only known he smokes for the best part of forty-eight hours and he’s already scrounging. Not that it’s particularly surprising. It’s what he does, and the most exciting thing that’s happened all shift is Miles coming back from a tea break and announcing, _Right, let’s see what’s clogging up my email today._

Kent almost doesn’t blame him for looking for a reason to get out of the room.

‘Come on. Just one?’

Mansell’s pleading tone is full of piss-taking sincerity. Kent rolls his eyes and fixes him with an irked look that neither of them really believe, blithely waving his hand over the work on his desk. Yet Kent’s eyes fall on Chandler (as they are wont to do), and he can’t help but notice that the man’s looked up and is peering at them in a pointed way that Kent doesn’t like anymore.

‘Tell you what,’ he says, grabbing the pack from his desk drawer. ‘I’ll keep you company.’

If Mansell’s surprised he doesn’t show it. Instead he stays hot on Kent’s heels as he makes a beeline for the set of doors closest to the car park, leaning on the handle to let them out and the cool almost-winter air in. The weather’s still shit, but at least it’s not raining, and Kent ends up leaning against the station wall, looking at a sky the colour of porridge with too much water as Mansell comes to a stop at his side.

‘What was that about?’

Kent shuts him up by handing him the entire packet. He’d rather lose half of them to Mansell’s sticky fingers than try and put words together because he’s not found a suitable surrogate answer for that question yet. He’s got no idea what this is about, he’s got no idea what he’s doing or where he’s supposed to go with it. They’re all in fucking limbo and they bloody well know it.

‘Needed a break,’ he says when Mansell nudges his shoulder and hands the cardboard back.

‘Don’t we all,’ Mansell says, the words interrupted by the obstruction in his mouth as he raises a flame. 

Kent can almost feel a ripple of suspicion run through his friend as he takes out of his own own and does the same, exchanging the pack for a cheap lighter. He ignores the way Mansell shoots him another attempt at a wry look.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ he says, the tone leading.

Kent huffs; smoke curls around his fingers. ‘I don’t.’

‘Right.’ There’s another fleeting glance, then: ‘If that’s your line…’

It’s his line and he’s sticking with it. Mansell can think what he wants. He probably wouldn’t understand—he’s always got his hands full, hasn’t he? There’s no need to add keeping his hands busy to his to-do list. He keeps himself busy. 

Even though Kent says nothing, Mansell catches his eye again and shrugs. ‘I’ll smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.’ 

A laugh slips from Kent’s throat. ‘I expected as much.’

Mansell’s answering chuckle extends into a slow curl of a smile. They don’t say much else, not at first. This isn’t something they do and Kent’s still trying to stop his mind from wondering what that look the skipper had just about managed to shoot him on the way out meant. It’s when Kent leans to tap the ashes into the gutter that Mansell opens his mouth again.

‘You all right, mate?’ he asks, almost uncharacteristically careful. ‘I mean, you’ve been a bit funny since—’

‘We’ve all been a bit funny since.’

Kent resists the urge to glare at him. Instead he keeps his gaze fixed forwards, watching the tendrils of smoke feather out into the air. Mansell’s right. He has been off since that evening, the aborted divorce party. How couldn’t he be changed by all that? Everything else has been.

'The boss isn't too pleased about it.’

Mansell says it to the empty area car parked beside them. Kent glares at him from the corner of his eye and wonders whether or not he can get away with ignoring that comment. But for once Mansell’s tone isn’t tinged with his dark, laddish comedy, and Kent’s almost tempted to humour him. Except he’s not lost all his sense, and he lets out a singular laugh that probably comes across more like a tut.

'The boss can think what he wants,’ he says in the end, on a long sigh.

(He can. He will. Kent learnt long ago that he can’t influence what Chandler thinks. If he could, he might have been able to help. Just a little.)

Mansell laughs, short and brusque, as he gestures back into the building with the hand he’d parked in his pocket. ‘He looked at me like I'd suggested we come out here for a round of Russian roulette.'

'To him, we might as well be.'

Kent says it darkly, because it’s true, but there’s a low chuckle from Mansell’s direction nonetheless. He’d never been very good at judging the magnitude of a situation, so it’s no surprise, really. A heavy weight sits on Kent’s shoulders, his poor besieged heart, and Mansell identifies it as a joke. Maybe it is. Kent wouldn’t be especially surprised if it turns out that his own interpretation’s shot. He’s spent long enough thinking about it—to no avail—to have it all muddled.

He almost jumps when there’s a touch at his elbow, a nudge of knuckles. He turns, cigarette left hanging between his fingers, and finds an especially strange expression on Mansell’s face. It’s not entirely unamused, but there’s much more sobriety in it than usual.

Mansell thrusts his head backwards, indicating the hall they’d come through, the most direct route back to the incident room. 'He wants back in your good books, you know.' 

'Then he'll have to ask himself,’ Kent mutters, kicking at a rogue piece of gravel.

‘Like he’d trust me to ask you for him.’

‘Look, I don’t want to talk about it.’

Mansell twists his smile into something that on someone else might come across as stern. All the effort on his part won’t change Kent’s mind—he doesn’t have the words to use for this, not yet, not outside his own head. He knows they all know. Miles had twigged the same week he had, catching his elbow after a shift that first year and saying _You’ll have trouble with that one, lad._ Mansell noticed within hours of arrival, probably, though he only let on at Ed’s house when they were undercover, hissing _I didn’t get a smile like that_ when they collided on route to the overworked kettle. Riley says she just knew, like a twinge in the back of her brain that crept up whenever she saw them look at each other, and she nudges them a little closer together every way she can.

‘What are you going to do instead?’ Mansell asks, and there’s a determination to his voice that makes Kent wonder if someone’s put him up to this. Then he laughs and it’s clear no one has. ‘Smoke angrily at him?’

‘D’you think that would work?’

‘Probably.’ He chuckles, once, then shrugs. ‘Though I'm not sure what your definition of work actually is, in this case.’

Kent isn’t either. He doesn’t know what to do, not about this (whatever this is) and he just wants it to go back to what it was (whatever that was). None of them are happy, but he’s started asking himself if they ever have been, or if that’s even possible for people who do what they do. See what they see. At the end of the day there has to be something that gives, and in Kent’s experience, it’s humanity that does. Not chance, not coincidence. There’s only so many years in a copper. Some more than others. Chandler may have arrived at his station with a few fewer under his belt than the rest of the inspectors, but who’s to say he doesn’t have fewer overall? 

‘Why am I asking you, anyway?’ Kent asks, more to the cement at his feet than to anyone else.

‘Because I’ve fucked up enough times and I’m still all right.’ 

Mansell had said it with an entirely straight face but he barks out another laugh as Kent turns to fix him with an unimpressed look that probably got lost somewhere in the exhalation of smoke.

‘Are you saying I could learn from you?’

‘I’m saying I could see why you might want to.’

Right. Of course Mansell would think that. Kent turns back to what’s quickly becoming his bit of pavement—the slab with the pattern of cracks that look a little like a bear’s face, if you squint—and, after another moment’s silence, huffs out a single sound that was once, in another life, a laugh. 

‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a twat?’ 

‘Yes. Plenty.’ Mansell grins unchecked. ‘I’m thinking of getting it printed on business cards.’

Against his better judgement Kent finds himself fighting back a smile. It shouldn’t be funny, because they’re all wallowing in something and none of them know what it is or how far away the bottom is, but for the briefest of seconds Kent wants to smile because it’s almost as if they’re back to where they were before, with Mansell saying stupid things and the rest of them taking turns to tell him off for it. So when there’s a sound from inside the building that sounds like someone else crashing towards the exterior doors, Kent crushes the remnant of his cigarette under his heel and and tries to say, ‘Oh, fuck off,’ without laughing as he turns back inside.

*

‘I’m off for lunch, then.’

Mansell perks up at the mention of a meal, then crumples again when he remembers what Kent means. The rest of them don’t even react—they’re used to it by now, and as a team they’re a lot less reactive than they used to be so he gets no more than a grunt’s worth of a goodbye from the skipper as he walks out to meet Erica.

She’d called one morning not long after it all went wrong and just said, ‘Lunch, in twenty minutes? I’ve got something to run by you,’ then after that it’d become something of a routine. Every week or so. Not always the same day, although they always end up in the same place; they know their timing from there, how far they can push it, and they can be sure the coffee’s decent. That first time had been to do with work, for the both of them. Erica works for the papers so sees all the shit before it gets thrown and something had been dropped on her desk that looked like it might be able to create quite a lot of trouble for them. She couldn’t be sure, she doesn’t know all the ins and outs because it’s one of the few things Kent won’t tell her—a contractual obligation—but there were enough familiar names for her to wonder.

In the end it turned out to be nothing, but everyone in the office immediately warmed to the faceless entity of ‘Kent’s sister.’ Once, afterwards, when Kent had just been pulling on his coat to go and meet her, Miles had slipped him a fiver and said, ‘You get that girl a coffee on me. It’s not often we meet a journalist who’s a decent sort.’ She’d snorted at that, said what high praise it was coming from a copper, and sent Miles a bottle of whiskey for his troubles.

Kent reckons she’s just buttering him up, because he knows her, but he lets it happen. They need something to smile about, and if what’s going to do it for him is glancing through the windows of the café and spotting that she’s already ordered him a double cappuccino, then that’s what’ll do it for him. Maybe that’s why it’s there. She might already be able to tell. They haven’t spoken for a few days, not since the inquest.

She doesn’t stand to embrace him as he approaches the table. ‘Right then. What’s got your goat?’

Kent shoots her a look that’s supposed to say more about the absurdity of the question rather than serve as some sort of denial. If he just says no, she’ll know. Just like she had every other bloody time they’ve had this conversation. Which has been too often for Kent’s liking, recently.

‘Something has.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘You stink of smoke.’ 

Kent rolls his eyes, shrugging off his overcoat. ‘And you’ve got the nose of a prize-winning bloodhound.’

‘Come on, I know you. There’s something on your mind.’

‘No, there’s not.’

Erica sits back in her seat, arms crossed. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Funny, that,’ he says, glancing up at her as he leans to sit down. ‘I could have sworn I was telling the truth.’

He twinges at the lie; she probably notices. She probably feels it. Either way it’s this preternatural ability of hers to take one look at him and know that there’s something weighing on his mind that’s heavier than the usual policeman’s baggage that makes him hesitant to talk about it. She always— _always_ —ends up knowing more than he really wants her to. Maybe that’s why she’s a journalist. Maybe it’s just because Kent’s always been about as transparent as air to everyone in his immediate family.

She gazes at him coolly from behind her flat white. ‘I’ll tell Mum.’

‘Somehow,’ Kent says, quirking an unperturbed smile, ‘that doesn’t feel as much of a threat as it did when I was seventeen.’

Erica can’t help but laugh at that. It harks back to a time when she’d had straight As in everything and he couldn’t keep anything straight. Her threats didn’t really work then, either, because as often as she trotted them out she never actually saw them through. She never stuck him in it—he did that all by himself.

‘D’you want anything to eat? My treat this week,’ she says, burying the hatchet for the time being.

‘Just the usual, if you don’t mind.’

His phone beeps from the inside of his coat pocket as Erica beckons over one of the wait staff; he twists in the chair to fish it out, because Erica’s own mobile’s face-up on the table next to her plate and they’ve never had qualms about interrupting conversations. If she takes offence then he’ll just have to remind her of the time she’d taken one look at her beeping phone and shot back to work without another word until eight that evening.

Riley’s name pops up on the screen: _Green tea supplies critical. Would you mind picking some up?_ Kent pulls his mouth to one side but texts back an agreement nonetheless. It’s on his way back, more or less. He might as well, but Kent still doubts Chandler’s noticed that he hasn’t had to buy a replacement box of tea bags in a month. 

‘Still being a little shit, is he?’ Erica asks as he sets his phone down again. 

It’s probably a little more nuanced than that. Hell, Kent knows it is.

He still nods and says, ‘Yes,’ as if it isn’t.

‘It’s not really his fault he’s an arsehole.’ Erica sighs and tilts her head as if she’s considering it. ‘But he is an arsehole.’

They both know they’re talking about Chandler, specifically; they just rarely say his name out loud. And certainly not while they’re both in public, since they both know too much about what an overheard comment can do. Kent’s wondered which would be worse—Chandler somehow finding out what effect he has on him, or Kent being bumped back down to PC—and he’s never really decided. They’d probably both happen, in the event.

Erica’s still looking at him with the appraising expression that she nicked off their mum. Kent opens his arms slightly, holds his hands up in a wordless indication that he’s all right, look, no punctures, no blood, nothing missing. She simply narrows her eyes. 

Kent sighs and returns his hands to the warmed ceramic.  ‘I’m still functioning, aren’t I?’

‘Barely.’

‘Thanks,’ he says, looking at her with the most level expression he owns, but she still mimes a cigarette.

He ignores her, pointedly turning to study the handwritten specials board with an intensity that’s close to unnatural, and Erica just lets her hand fall to her lap and rolls her eyes.

‘You’re odd, you know,’ she says as he returns his attention to the table. ‘Not only do you like cold toast, but you go through flurries of smoking.’

‘Cold toast isn’t that weird.'

Erica shoots him a look that says _That’s not the point_. ‘You smoked a pack a day for a week in 2005.’

‘That was…’ Kent tries to remember the excuse he’d used at the time but fails. ‘That was different.’

‘You nicked a pack of Rob’s at Christmas in 2003.’

‘Do you keep a scrapbook or something?’

‘If you’re smoking, there’s a crisis somewhere in your vicinity,’ Erica continues, ignoring the sarky comments that sometimes save him from scrutiny. She sits back in her chair and folds her arms, nodding towards the way Kent’s started to twist his fingers together. ‘I haven’t forgotten, you know.’

Kent sometimes wonders if he’s had more crises than the rest of his family put together. It just wasn’t everyday that your twin sister’s fiancé (now ex, thankfully) makes a pass at you when you’re left alone around the dinner table (2003), or that you found out your boyfriend was a person of interest in one of Organised Crime’s investigations (2005) or that you’re watching your boss that you’re in love with shrink back into the mould he’d arrived in, everything you’d coaxed out of him dashing straight back into that brain of his and you know you can’t do a fucking thing about it (this year, now, today).

’You know what you should do instead?’ Erica says, her tone eerily pensive. She’s never pensive.

‘What?’

‘Stick two fingers up and say fuck ‘em.’

Kent barks out a surprised laugh. ‘That’s always your philosophy.’

‘And it’s served me well.’

That’s debatable. It depends on how you define well, though knowing her she means that she’s still alive and still jolly, so anything goes. She’s said all this to him before, and he’s got the same qualms now as he had then. He might have moments where he wants to strangle everyone he works with, but if he tells them to fuck off then it’s in jest. Mostly. The doubt that crawls up the back of his neck to his mind is the new, troublesome sensation. He knows, realistically, that they’re all doing their best and that their reactions to trauma are probably well within the normal expectations, but Kent can’t stop the anger from welling up. It’s just a lottery as far as where it’s directed.

Erica looks as if he’s just said everything he’s felt out loud—although he hasn’t, he hopes to god he hasn’t—but thankfully their lunch arrives just in time to derail whatever unsolicited advice what about to come out of her house. Apparently her office is nowhere near as generous on the biscuits front as they are in the incident room and just like when they were teenagers she’s distracted by the need to eat enough to get through the rest of the day in what she no doubt sees as in impoverished half an hour. If Kent wasn’t as much of a pessimist, he’d be glad they seem to have moved away from a detailed dissection of his failings, but it’s just an interval. It’s always just an interval.

He’d enjoy it if he could, but he doesn’t appear to be in the right sort of mood for that. He can’t even taste the food, not really, and although Erica might say it’s because of the smoking Kent knows it’s more the fault of the stress. It doesn’t help that the waiter’s overly attentive, stopping at their sides, dark-haired and light-eyed, far too often for them to actually to have changed their opinion. Maybe it annoys him so much because it reminds him of all the times he’s gone up to Chandler with a file or good news, right down to the cautious, hope-flecked expression. Maybe it’s more down to the way Erica encourages it. He’s long past the point where he bristles at anyone who shows interest in her, but of course this guy doesn’t know that. Probably why he keeps shooting Kent wary glances.

‘I don’t know if that waiter would be more intimidated if he thought I was your boyfriend or your brother,’ he says, once he’s walked away from them again.

‘Doesn’t matter either way, does it? Detective sort of trumps them both in the scaring people shitless department.’ Erica grins and it’s almost like she’s nineteen again. ‘Either way, I think he’s more interested in you to be honest.’

‘Come off it.’

‘Don’t look now, but…’ Erica trails off and nods significantly over Kent’s shoulder.

Kent turns; he shouldn’t, he knows he shouldn’t trust her because she’s pulled this trick a hundred times, but he does. It’s immediately clear what she means, because the guy’s looking at him from half-secreted eyes; he might have been able to write it off as misinterpreted if he hadn’t snapped his gaze down to the counter at the speed of light when Kent accidentally met his eye. Against his better judgement, Kent feel himself go awkwardly hot and he turns back to Erica’s mischievous smirk. Except he can’t bear that for very long, either, so he ends up keeping his eyes down, studying the last few gulps of his coffee.

‘Why don’t you?’ Erica asks, coaxing his eyes up with her tone. ‘You aren’t tied down.’

He is, actually, but she refuses to see it that way. Then again, she’s never had trouble like he has, she managed to avoid the hereditary apprehensive streak that’s in the rest of them.

‘Come on, little brother. Weasel your way into some trousers for once.’ 

He shoots her a disgruntled look; she grins. She’s always called him that. No amount of protesting, not even over twenty years, could have convinced her to stop. Even logic—that she’s only eight minutes older than him, that in the grand scheme of things eight minutes doesn’t mean shit—can’t change her mind. It doesn’t do any more to deter her this time than it had when they were twelve.

‘You used to be quite good at it.’

Kent harrumphs. ‘Ten years ago, maybe.’

Or three months, as the case may be. His skills aren’t rusty yet, although his enjoyment of employing them seem to have dwindled to nothing in the past few years. When it comes down to it he always has to be careful not to say Chandler’s name when he’s furthest out of his mind.

‘Don’t frown like that,’ she says, reaching for the end of her coffee. ‘Your face’s already got more lines than the London Underground.’ 

‘Oh, charming.’

‘I do my best.’

Kent huffs a quiet chuckle; Erica almost does the same but her phone vibrates and she’s looking at it almost immediately with that same keen expression that she’d worn him down with over the years.

‘Right, it’s that time again, Em,’ she says, switching the device’s screen off with an extended finger. ‘She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has noticed my extended absence.’

He chuckles at the nickname; Erica’s boss isn’t what you’d call a fan of extended lunch breaks. Decidedly continental, she’d called them once, and Erica hadn’t stopped laughing about it for a week.

‘Best get off, then,’ he says, tucking his own mobile into his jacket.

‘I wish you would.’ 

‘Erica.’

(She’s just as bad as bloody Mansell when it comes to spotting innuendo.)

She grins at him, and that’s feral as Mansell’s, too. ‘It’d do you good, you know.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Kent doubts that. ‘Maybe.’

She shakes her head, a tut hidden in there somewhere, then leans to dig a scarf from the depths of her bag and wraps it around her neck in that way Kent’s never been able to figure out. It involves a knot, somewhere, because he watches her tie it but he’s never managed to spot it between the rest of the fabric, cupped around her chin. She leaves her hair tucked in and gets to her feet, dragging her coat from the back of the chair with a clatter. Kent does the same, leaving a few notes tucked under a saucer, and follows Erica out onto the street. She stops suddenly, tying the knot on her trench, and Kent has to side-step to avoid running straight into her.

‘Hold on a minute,’ she says, turning and catching his elbow. ‘I promised Jill a decent coffee. A bribe, if you will, for keeping my arse out of trouble.’

Kent nods and tucks his hands into his pockets, standing with his back to the shop window. He almost wishes he had a scarf to tuck his chin into, because it’s blisteringly cold when the wind picks up and this is one of those roads that seems to double as a wind tunnel. He wrinkles his nose instead and finds that even when he relaxes the muscle it takes a moment to unstick: it’s _that_ cold, then. Colder than usual for this time of year. More reason to grumble about having to veer off route back to the station; a Tesco would be better than a Sainsburys, they usually have a reliably wider selection of awkward teas, but that means excusing himself from Erica’s company earlier. She’ll probably think he’s just trying to avoid any more well-intentioned interrogation. _Shit_. There’s no way out.

(There never has been, has there?)

Erica returns not five minutes later, right about the time when Kent was starting to wonder if he’d get back to the office with a veil of ice on his skin, with a paper coffee cup in her hand and napkin tucked haphazardly between her fingers. She holds out the napkin without a word, nudging him to take it from her hand as she double-checks the zip on her bag. He watches her movements with a bemused expression and takes the offering without thinking why, exactly, she’d be giving him anything of the sort. It’s when he looks at it, looks at it properly in the way he does almost instinctually now, with a detective’s eye, that he frowns. 

‘What’s this?’ he asks, indicating the writing on one corner.

‘Jake’s number.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Erica.’

He glances around them, at the street and the people hurrying past them, but he doesn’t really see any of it. His gaze settles on a scrawled _Help Wanted, Inquire Inside_ for a moment, but the wind picks up and Erica swears as it ruffles her hair in the wrong direction and he has to turn back to her, to the name and number and the expectation. 

She looks to him, smirking. ‘Just in case you fancy scratching an itch.’

‘Oh, _God_ ,’ he says, dragging the words through an exasperated exhalation. He worries the material between his fingers for a moment, then shakes his head. ‘I’m not sleeping with someone called Jake.’

Erica stares at him for a long moment, then bursts out laughing. ‘That’s the most feeble excuse I’ve ever heard.’

Kent knows it is. It’s probably the weakest he’s ever used, but he’s trotted out enough in front of her that he’s not entirely sure. Either way he follows her lead as she walks down the road, glancing back only once to make sure he’s still with her. He folds the napkin in an imprecise square and shoves it in a pocket; he won’t look at it again. He knows the difference between an appreciative look that precedes a shag and a careful glance that says the wearer’s imagining the possibility of something more, or wondering what sort of films he likes or if he’d be likely to accept an invitation to dinner. He knows because he’s worn them all looking at Chandler, at one time or another, and it wouldn’t be fair on Kent or this Jake to indulge in that charade.  

He’s not interested, not in that long-term sort of thing, not with anyone he can have. Just the one he can’t.

It wouldn’t work with Jake, anyway.

His eyes are the wrong shade of blue.


	2. Chapter 2

For the first time in a month, a call comes in—suspected mugging gone wrong, local lad—and Chandler takes someone other than Miles out with him. Kent doesn’t know whether to be thrilled or suspicious. He leans towards the latter because although he’s following Chandler into a Thames-side pub that their vic’s supposed to have favoured, it’s just one in a series. He’s taking them out in turn, like an apology. It won’t work. Kent doesn’t want to be placated with a false promise; Chandler’s heart’s not in it. She’s still got it. And she can’t exactly give it back to him now, can she?

The pub’s disguised as something stylish. As if it’s somewhere that invites small, unknown bands and catapults them to greatness. Except Kent spent most of his twenties in one variation or another of those and this place doesn’t even touch the sides. It’s far too clean, for one, which Chandler probably sees as a good thing. Maybe that’s why he’s relatively comfortable standing against the bar, showing his warrant card to the landlord.

‘DI Chandler, Whitechapel CID. This is my colleague, DC Kent.’

Kent dutifully nods, stood at Chandler’s shoulder. The man looks like pub landlords the world over: good-natured, comradely, but with the vague impression that he’d have no qualms about hurling you of the building at the first sign of trouble.

‘How can I help you, gents?’ he asks, offering his hand after chucking a dishcloth beneath the counter. ‘Jerry Hunt.’

Chandler hesitates for a moment, but only as much as someone who knows him well would notice, and he shakes the man’s hand with a grip that looks as firm as Kent thinks it would feel.

‘We’re looking for anyone who knew Alexander Larson,’ Chandler explains.

‘Alexander?’

‘He may have gone by Alex.’

‘We get a hundred of ‘em through here,’ Hunt says, shrugging. Kent can’t disagree—he’s come across enough blokes called Alex in his time, and he only half remembers them. ‘Anyway, I’m terrible with names, just ask my wife.’

Chandler cracks a slight smile; Kent sees that it doesn’t touch his eyes as he turns to motion for the photograph Kent had tucked into his coat pocket in the car.

‘Would this help?’ Chandler asks, holding out the image held loosely between two fingers.

Hunt leans across the counter to get a better look. ‘Never knew his name was Alex, but yeah, he’s been in here. Regular enough.’

‘Anything you know about him would be very useful us.’

‘Me? Sod all,’ he says with a dry resigned laugh. ‘Though, you might be in luck. Clara—Clara Vincent—she works behind the bar most weeknights. She spoke to him more than me, so she might have a little more to say.’ 

‘And where might we find her?’

‘Like I said, you’re in luck. She’s on break at the moment,’ Hunt nods past Kent’s shoulder, through the glass of the closest window. ‘Usually spends this time of day staring out over the river.’

Kent glances over his shoulder and finds her where Hunt says she is, a silhouette in the grey river air. Chandler slides him the usual look that serves an order and Kent excuses himself; this is his job, after all, so this surge into the winter morning isn’t necessarily an escape. He’d just been going too hot in there because of the heating, not because he’d stood close enough to Chandler’s shoulder to feel the fabric of their coats brush but still feel as if Chandler’s miles and miles away.

God, he’s got to learn how to pull himself together.

‘Clara Vincent?’

The silhouette turns to reveal a skinny girl with too much nose, her mousy hair a mess from the damp wind and all the finger-wringing; she peers at Kent’s face then flicks her gaze towards his police identification.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m DC Emerson Kent, Whitechapel CID.’ He holds up his warrant card for inspection. ‘Your boss pointed me in your direction.’

‘CID? This about the body in Weavers Fields?’

Everyone’s heard of CID these days; people know what it means. They know that if the boys from CID show up then it’s a little more than just routine inquiries or parking tickets. Though there had been the one guy who’d clapped Miles on the shoulder and said, ‘Coppers in disguise, eh?’ a couple of weeks ago. That had been a one-off. 

‘I’m afraid so,’ he says.

‘Christ.’ She worries a thumbnail between her teeth. ‘You know who it is yet?’ 

‘A preliminary identification has been made.’ He waits for a beat, then says: ‘Alexander Larson.’

'Oh my God,' she says, the words drawn out in a long, painful breath. 

Kent’s just about to trot out one of the usual comforting things they say—comforting but still firmly professional—but she turns away and back towards the water. The waves lap against the shore; this time in the morning leaves the muddy banks open and in the pregnant silence the loudest sound is a pair of arguing seagulls, squawking just out of sight. Clara rises up on her toes for a moment and apart from the hand tight against her mouth she might have looked merely curious; when she turns again it’s only to get Kent in the periphery of her vision. He steps further to one side, so that she doesn’t have to twist her neck so much, and finds that her gaze is skittish, eyes wide.

‘Oh, God, I feel terrible asking like this, but you don’t happen to have any cigs on you?’ She wrings her hands, braces her palms flat against the stone. ‘I shouldn’t really—I mean, I packed it in, or tried to, but, Christ, _Alex_ —’

Kent goes for the cigarette in his coat pocket without thinking twice; he doesn’t need it, not as much as her, and the look of relief she gives him as he holds it out towards her says it all. He offers a flame as well, and she cups it with chapped hands until the tip catches, her eyes both blank and flickering at the same time. Kent’s never felt it—the weight being pulled off your shoulders by nicotine, smoke filling the crevices in your mind so its self-torment is dulled. He’s reliant on the action, the routine, the sequence of events he has to keep an eye on so he doesn’t set the curtains on fire. It’s a version of anxious hand-wringing, but more all-consuming, more definite. You don’t accidentally find yourself halfway through a cigarette. He doesn’t, at least.

She blows the smoke into the air, watching it dissipate against the dull sky, and blinks fast and hard.

‘You?’ 

‘Strictly speaking, I’m not supposed to on duty.’

Kent’s not even sure if that excuse is true. It probably is, the reasoning buried somewhere in the thousands of pages of manuals kept in the station. Chandler would want it to be true, regardless; smoking doesn’t fit in with his smoked salmon sandwiches and green tea sort of lifestyle. Except Kent’s never thought that with such disdain about him before and it makes him want to burn his lungs with ash and fire, flush out the hate with smoke. 

‘Fair enough,’ she says, and the shrug’s too heavy to be truly offhand.

She wraps an arm around her middle and rests an elbow on her wrist, holding the narrow column of smoke slightly away from the both of them. Kent lets her study the cracks in the pavement for a moment more, silent, until another gust of wind picks up and she has to use her free hand to hold her hair out of her eyes.

‘Miss Vincent—’

‘Clara.’

‘Clara,’ he corrects himself, only out of politeness. ‘Your boss tells us you knew Alex Larson.’

‘Yeah—well, I mean, not really,’ she says. ‘I suppose you could say I knew him. Biblically. But I didn’t really know him.’ She rubs at her mouth, her fingers lingering over the words. ‘You could ask me what his middle name was and I wouldn’t know.’

‘Any information you could give us would be helpful.’

‘I could tell you what pint of bitter he always ordered. And how many he could get down him.’ She smiles briefly, looking at the pavement between them. ‘And the sort of music he liked. We had almost identical record collections.' 

‘His job, perhaps?’ Kent prompts.

‘He, um… he worked for a web start-up, I think. He wasn’t that bothered about it. Said it paid the bills and not much else.’

‘And you said slept with him.’

‘Yeah, just the once. He was nice.’ She lets the smoke drift with her words, glancing after it towards the river. ‘And because he looked like Danny. A bit. If you closed your eyes and wished.’

Kent knows how that feels. It’d been a long time and it was dark and he couldn’t see his eyes. He doesn’t need to ask her to explain about who this Danny bloke is. Not yet, anyway. The way her face lights up is enough backstory—as is the way her features fall so quickly. She turns back to the cigarette as if it’s long lost kin and takes two long drags, burning away both the length and the thought.

‘I suppose that makes me a certifiably bad person,’ she says, blowing out the smoke so it catches the wind. She laughs, once, but doesn’t smile. ‘Capitalised, and all.’

Kent’s face softens into something he hopes is reassuring. ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

‘And I suppose you’d see enough to know.’ 

They share a smile, then, but its wings are clipped and it can’t go very far. It doesn’t try. Clara looks back down at her shoes, the scuffed toes and the half-broken zip. She nudges at the clasp with the other foot for a moment, then rearranges herself on two feet and sighs.

‘No one I’ve ever slept with’s died before,’ she says.

Kent doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s got no more experience with it than she has. All his exes are very much alive and kicking. The ones he can account for are, anyway. There are a handful that he can’t be entirely sure about. There are one or two whose names he can’t say he remembers. But none of that is relevant, no matter how it sticks to the sides of his mind and makes him glance back towards Chandler’s profile in the pub window, and he bites at the inside of his cheek.

She doesn’t seem to need him to offer an answer. Instead she regards the wharf opposite, the grid of windows and balconies, and after a long sigh raises the cigarette to the corner of her mouth.

‘Oh, shit,’ she mutters as she realises it’s gone out. ‘Couldn’t bother you for another light, could I?’

Kent reaches into his pocket again to retrieve the lighter; he lets her do it this time, snapping the flame into life with her nails painted a chipped dusky blue.

‘How did you meet?’ he asks, accepting the lighter back with a small nod of thanks.

‘He was one of the regulars. You get plenty of familiar faces round here. Offices, y’know?’

Clara gestures around them; Kent already knows. There’s offices everywhere these days. The river police headquarters aren’t far away, in fact.

‘Who did he usually come in with?’

‘There are a couple of guys. A Ben, I think, and a Jake?’ She frowns at her curved knuckles. ‘I don’t know their surnames.’

‘You didn’t get on with them?’

‘I have to get on with the punters. Unless they’re vile, but Jerry usually deals with that sort before long. No, there was just no reason for me to know.’

‘You were friends with Alex, though.’

‘Look, I’m not even sure how well he knew them. All I know is that Alex was a regular, we got on, we liked the same bands, we fucked.’ She flicks the ashes from the edge of her cigarette. ‘I liked him well enough.’

She keeps oscillating between hard and sensitive, between saying fuck off and asking his advice. Kent can’t, and doesn’t, blame her; he’d do the same, he reckons, if someone just walked up to him on his break and told him someone he knew was dead. And he’s thought about it more than most people, probably. He knows how often it happens.

Kent nods at nothing in particular, thinking back over what’s been said, when Clara looks back up at him with wide eyes. It looks as if she’s trying not to blink, but that could equally be the wind; it doesn’t matter, either way, because she’s choosing words to say and if there’s one thing Kent’s supposed to do it’s listen.

‘Do people usually cry, when you tell them?’ she asks, saying the words so carefully that they might be shards of broken glass. ‘I don’t… I don’t feel as if I could.’ There’s a thin, choked sound in her throat, then: ‘I didn’t love him.’

He doesn’t want to tell her that it’ll hit her eventually. In a few hours, in a day, in a week, in a month. You don’t have to love someone to care. You just have to know and feel and not be able to forget. And no one’s able to forget.

But he doesn’t. He just asks ‘When did you see him last?’

‘It would have been… evening before yesterday, I think.’

‘Did anything seem out of the ordinary?’

She half-shrugs. ‘He came in at the usual sort of time, got his round in.’

‘I sense a but here.’ 

‘Yeah, maybe.’ She gives a small laugh but it’s not really a laugh at all. ‘He changed. Afterwards.’ There’s a gravity to the word that makes the connotation clear. ‘He’d always been a nice guy, before. Top bloke.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know, it might just be me, but… he seemed… less warm. Not cold, just reserved for some reason. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.’ She pauses, sending a stream of smoke into the air, and seems to steel herself against the inevitable. ‘But I suppose that’s to be expected. We weren’t a we. He wouldn’t have confided anything in me.’

Kent knows that feeling, too, the almost-closeness, the pseudo-understanding, the distance over small spaces. He just doesn’t particularly want to think about it.

‘About what time was this?’

‘Eight or so?’ She drops the end of cigarette, crushes it into the pavement, and nods towards the closest tower block. ‘After the first round of the office lot.’

‘And you?’ 

He tries to say it in a way that doesn’t sound accusatory, but she still shoots him a sharp look that fizzles out before it can cause much trouble. Kent knows that means very little, in the grand scheme of things. Even the most innocent, pure as driven snow, are taken aback at the mere suggestion of involvement. He’s seen more killers unfazed than not.

‘I went straight home after my shift,’ Clara says, as if that’s the obvious choice. ‘I don’t usually feel like going out afterwards, so I just went back. Chloe—one of my flatmates—she’d done a meal that night. They’d left some for me, thinking they’d be in bed by the time I got back but there was something on the telly they wanted to watch… you know, one of those late-night repeats of classic films? So they were still up. I ate, had a cup of tea with them for the last half-hour, then went to bed.’

Kent nods, relaxing his stance a little. ‘Thank you for your time. I don’t think we’ll need to speak to either of your flatmates, but if there’s a number you’d prefer to be contacted on…?’

He trails off; she knows what he means. She pulls a thin pile of business cards from her back pocket—they’re for the pub, but she flips the thin card over and, taking the proffered pen with a grateful glance, prints another phone number. 

‘My mobile,’ she says, handing over both the pen and the card. ‘I don’t answer it when I’m working, but you know how to contact me there already. And my address, just in case.’  

‘Thanks. We’ll be in touch to arrange a time for you to come in and provide some elimination prints.’

Clara nods. ‘I’d best get back. Only got a ten-minute break, after all.’

There’s something a little wobbly in the smile she tries to conjure up, but Kent gives what he hopes is a reassuring one back as he turns. Despite her words she doesn’t immediately follow, but that’s probably for the best, because Chandler’s already waiting, stood next to an empty and sea-weathered picnic table that’s well past fashionably shabby. Another failing for the attempted aesthetic, though Kent can admit that this winter they’re having can’t be kind on anything that lives outside.

It’s all irrelevant, of course, but it’s so much easier to think about that as he approaches rather than the way Chandler’s looking at him, expectant and overly professional. Even for him. A year ago there might have been a careful smile, some slight unsaid atonement from them both about the suspension; two years ago there would have been an openly friendly look, characteristic of an era when Miles had joked that if they weren’t careful they’d soon be the station’s dynamic duo. But life had fucked all that up, and just as Kent gets close enough Chandler starts walking too, steering their direction without actually having to say anything. 

‘Anything?’ Kent asks, falling more or less into step.

‘Not much. He recognises the face but doesn’t know much about him personally. He did confirm that he was in on the night he died, though.’

‘Timing?’

Chandler holds up a copy of the receipt. ‘Paid with a card, around twenty past eight.’

‘More or less what Clara Vincent remembers, sir.’

Chandler hums. At one point it would have been heartening, encouraging, but now all Kent feels is as if they’re walking side by side but on entirely different planes. At one time they would have walked closer, shoulder to shoulder; now there’s easily an arm-length between them. Maybe two. Kent returns his hands to his pockets and looks past Chandler towards the distant tower blocks.

‘She knew him,’ he says, shrugging. ‘Casually.' 

‘Oh?’

‘They slept together.’ 

Chandler’s step falters for a second, slows as he thinks, but not for long enough for Kent to adjust his own speed. Instead he settles back into his indignant stride, how he walks when he’s on the way to tell someone off or coax a few answers out of someone.

‘And she didn’t think anything of it when he hadn’t called for a few days?’ he asks, his tone almost exasperated. 

Kent almost wants to flinch. Chandler flicks between irritability and apathy so quickly these days yet it still feels like a sting every time it happens. He’d thought maybe, at the beginning, that his own familiarity with the tendency might foster some kind of immunity, but as with most things that had just turned out to be another bit of wishful thinking.

‘That isn’t what they were like, sir,’ he says, softly, to the back of Chandler’s shoulder.

Chandler looks at him briskly, with a strange expression, then looks away. Kent resists the urge to shrug again, because he’s sure he wasn’t supposed to notice that, but how surprised can Chandler be? Clara Vincent and Alexander Larson aren’t the first people in the world to engage in such an arrangement, as he’d undoubtedly put it. People just go for a quick shag all the time, with people they don’t know, with people they like well enough, with people they’re friends with but no more. It doesn’t mean anything.

‘Anyway, she last saw him buying a round, and she’s got an alibi for the window Llewellyn gave us.’ He hands over the card, warm from his hand, and their fingers don’t brush; there would have been a time when they did. ‘She lives with a couple of flatmates near Liverpool Street. She went straight back there after her shift, had a cup of tea and something to eat with the others, then went to bed.’

The explanation’s met with silence only broken by the mismatched footfalls. They walk a little further and Kent keeps his gaze forwards, keeping an eye on the irregular height of the paving slabs, until Chandler makes a sound in his throat that’s a close relative of disappointment.

‘Not much to go on, is there?’

Kent can’t lie. ‘No.’

And, for a moment, Kent feels as if that’s his fault—although he knows full well that it’s nothing he can control. But it isn’t as if that’s a particularly unknown sensation, so he follows Chandler towards the car anyway. 

*

Even though the incident room lacks windows, Kent can tell when day slips to evening and the light draws in. The time’s a decent indicator, for sunset is both early and reliably so, but there’s something more than that that settles on Kent’s mind as he taps a pen against his leg, the one fidgety movement he’s allowing himself. He functions well enough during the daylight hours, but when they’re all sat in a makeshift semicircle around Chandler, it’s more difficult to not let his mind wander, to not wonder about how dark and cold it’s going to be tonight. 

‘Riley,’ Chandler asks, turning away from where he’s been studying his handiwork on the whiteboards. ‘Anything from Larson’s office?’

She shakes her head and Kent feels the little flame of hope in his chest extinguish with a slight fizz.

‘Nothing of note, boss,’ she says, referring to a page at her elbow. ‘He was well-liked, got on with everyone and did his job well enough. Slated for a promotion, actually.’

‘Professional jealousy?’ Mansell suggests from where he’s parked himself at Kent’s desk, leaving Kent standing at its edge feeling a bit like a dog who’s just had its bed stolen by the family cat.

‘No one knew. His supervisor was still only considering the idea,’ Riley explains, though her expression sours a little. ‘Seemed very concerned about finding a replacement, actually.’

Miles makes a gruff noise from where he’s leant on the edge of the whiteboards; Kent can’t help but think that he must have a good vantage point from there to keep an eye on them. The skipper’s been doing that more and more recently and it never fails to set Kent on edge.

‘Business carries on, I suppose,’ Miles says, full of worldly wisdom that makes Mansell huff out what might be a muffled laugh. ‘Either way, I think we can rule out anything to do with his job. Everyone I spoke to were nowhere near Weavers Fields that night. Mostly at some drinks do in Shoreditch.’

Chandler taps the pen against his palm meditatively, something in his face tightening as he looks at the information that’ve laid out for him. They would have filled this silence before, when they knew where they were up to with one another, spitting out thoughts and theories as they came to mind. But now the team leaves Chandler with his thoughts, waiting for some sort of direction. The silence settles easily on the rest of them but Kent can’t ignore the sound of his own breathing, the way his throat tightens around the things he wants to say. He folds the corner of a page that’s slid out of alignment with the pile, pinching the crease until it’s sharp.

‘I’m not sure about Clara Vincent,’ Chandler says eventually, rapping a knuckle below her name.

‘Why?’ Kent asks, looking up so suddenly he feels something in his neck give. And if he’s bristling a bit at the same time, then that’s his business. ‘She didn’t give me any indication that there was anything else to her statement.’

‘You’ve only spoken to her once.’ Chandler doesn’t turn to look at him; instead he bends to write something else on the whiteboard. ‘And only informally.' 

‘And you haven’t spoken to her at all.’

Mansell shoots him a look from the other side of the desk; Kent pointedly ignores it, because he doesn’t need reminding that he just said that. He’d meant to only think it, yet those are the words ringing in his ears and he’s probably kidding himself about the way Chandler seems to stiffen and pause mid-letter for a heartbeat. 

‘I know the difference between grief and guilt, sir,’ Kent says. He’s had the same training as the rest of them, the same experience. ‘I don’t think there was anything in her manner that would suggest she’s involved. She’s got an alibi, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Kent’s got a point,’ Miles adds, crossing his arms and looking at the boss with a strange expression. ‘We’ve got her on the CCTV walking home. She was walking in the opposite direction from the scene—Kent, d’you have the times?’

The side of the desk digs in to Kent’s thigh as he reaches over the computer to grab at the page where he’d noted the timestamps. The sharp pain keeps him thinking straight as he hands it over.

‘Six instances, skip. I’ve got printouts on the way with screen grabs. I think there’s a bit of a queue with the printer.’

‘Sorry, that’s me,’ Riley says, getting to her feet. ‘Probably clogged it up. I’ll give it a slap, that usually does it.’

That must serve as a threat, because the printer suddenly clangs to life behind them all; Riley offers Kent a smile as she walks past, but he doesn’t return it. Miles moves from his perch and beckons for the pen in Chandler’s hand as he reads through the times. Kent almost regrets only roughly jotting them down; there might even be a rogue bit of the bastardised shorthand he picked up from his mum when she used to send him to do the shopping with a list that was only half legible. Either way Miles turns and writes the times and locations underneath Clara’s name, his slanted letters and numbers a world away from Chandler’s careful capitals. Kent knows Chandler prefers to do the boards himself; he can see it now, the slight tightness of his mouth, the way he rubs at his forehead as he accepts the returned pen.

Miles crosses his arms and fixes them all with one of his looks. ‘Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but I couldn’t leg it from Liverpool Street to Weavers Fields and back in half an hour and still have time to batter a bloke to death.’

Mansell shakes his head in a laugh. ‘Tried it, have you, skip?’

‘The times don’t add up,’ Riley says, firmly getting back to business. ‘And she couldn’t have just walked back down the street after that. Someone would have noticed the blood.’

‘She wouldn’t have had to do it herself, though. And she’s still the closest we’ve got to Larson,’ Chandler counters, looking around at them all in a single sweep.

Miles makes an unconvinced sound. It should feel like solidarity, but Kent reckons that’s been slipping recently.

‘She was sleeping with him, Miles.’

‘She _slept_ with him, sir.’ Kent corrects, because there’s a difference. ‘I wasn’t aware that was a crime.’

‘Good job it’s not,’ Riley says as she ferries the papers back to her desk; she presses the photographs into Kent’s hands on the way. ‘Otherwise Mansell would be up to his ears in court dates.’

A ripple of laughter makes its way around the room. Somehow its wave crashes into Kent and he feels no inclination to join in. Perhaps its because Chandler doesn’t—he hasn’t even done that flicker of a smile that sometimes breaks through the careful expression on his face—or perhaps it’s the simmering implication that the boss doesn’t trust his judgement anymore. He doesn’t entirely believe him, does he? Kent knows he’s lied—once, one fucking time, he’s cursed himself enough for that choice. But then Chandler hadn’t really understood at the time. He’d put it down to ego, to a sense of self-aggrandizement that Kent’s never had, and Kent had let him because he wanted to see him smile like that at him again.

He’d been a goner then, and he’s a goner now: no more, no less. They all might be, for all he knows, but sometimes it feels as if he’s the only one who’s floundering, the only one who’s acknowledged how much of a mess they’re in.

‘People have sex for all sorts of reasons,’ Kent says, continuing the argument even though he doubts a police station is the sort of place that would recognise the subtleties. ‘Love and lust are just the straightforward ones.’ 

Kent can’t help but think of the time he’d been slammed against a wall in his old flat, the tiny studio near Old Street station, by a recently ex-boyfriend. That hadn’t been lust, or love, but they’d still clawed off each other’s clothes and left bruises that wouldn’t fade for a week in the last throes. They hadn’t even made it to a bed, and every kiss started as a snarl, but they’d been twenty-two and angry. Kent doubted that Chandler would understand that.

‘All their experience proves,’ Kent says, carefully, ‘is that they knew each other.’

 Chandler looks as if he wants to disagree but knows that he’s on a slippery slope. ‘I think we can safely say that they knew each other a little better than he knew his work colleagues.'

‘Not necessarily, sir.’

Mansell shoots him a look at that, looks him up and down with an expression that says he didn’t think Kent had it in him. Mansell forgets he’s only known him two years. Mansell routinely forgets that he doesn’t know everything, actually, so Kent doesn’t stop to look back at him for very long. He doesn’t even really know why he’s pushing this so hard, why he’s standing between Clara Vincent and Chandler’s opinion; maybe it’s because he can sympathise. She’d all but said that Alex wasn’t the reason she was in bed with Alex. He should say, he should tell them, trot that out as evidence, but Chandler would want to talk to whoever Danny is and Kent couldn’t do that to her. If anyone had told Chandler about what he’d done, about what he’d settled for—

‘Even so,’ Chandler continues, looking away from all of them, even Miles. ‘She must have seen something in him. Connected, in some way. You’d think she’d be a little more affected than she was.’

Kent thinks she was; knows she was, in fact. Her hands had been shaking. Why was her going back to finish the shift such damning evidence? Especially when it’s the exact fucking thing Chandler had done, is doing, will do. 

‘Just because someone doesn’t react in that way you think is proper—‘

‘There are statistics and probabilities to take into account,’ Chandler interrupts.

‘Fine, so maybe she doesn’t cry when a man she’s slept with once— _once_ —turns up dead,’ Kent says, and the strident, harsh tone that comes out of his mouth almost scares him. ‘That doesn’t automatically make her a killer, or a sociopath—’

‘Stand down, constable!’

Kent’s mouth snaps shut. Chandler’s voice echoes in his head; it might do the same in the incident room but he can’t tell because the sudden silence is oppressive. The heat of humiliation slides its hands around his neck, runs a searing hotness down his spine. He’s liable to start sweating right there in the incident room because he and Chandler are still looking at each other. The DI’s eyes burn with the intensity of god-knows-what and Kent feels his mouth turn down, his expression settle on something a little more severe than put out because they all stopped doing this years ago and Chandler never— _never_ —joined in.

Maybe that’s why they’re all standing there, waiting. Waiting to see how this plays out. Kent can’t steady his rushed breathing but Riley’s sat there with an expression that would be at home on a parent who’s just heard their child swear for the first time and Miles looks like he wants to clock Chandler one. But Kent doesn’t let himself linger on any of that, on any of their small slivers of defence. He says nothing and drops the photocopies in his hands on the closest desk, relishing the slam of paper, and turns on his heel.

None of them try to stop him; they all know they couldn’t even if they tried and that they’d just be dumping more embarrassment on the lot of them. Kent has more than enough of that, burning high on his cheeks and driving him through the corridors, not quite running, until he crashes out into the night air like it’s a cold bath. He’d left his coat hanging over the back of his chair but he wants the air to bite. He wants to think about that, to curl away from that pain, rather than the stab of Chandler’’s tone. It’s childish, it’s so fucking childish it makes him want to cry but he can’t fucking well do that, can he?

His hands are shaking as he tucks himself away behind the closest corner and he curses them with a vehemence that betrays how hurt he’s trying not to feel. He swallows, hard, and drags his palms along the side of his thighs, the fabric of his trousers as grounding as the bricks pressing into his shoulder blades. That doesn’t work—he’s still shaking, still het up—and he crosses his arms instead, trapping his hands to keep them still but the twitch of unease in his fingers doesn’t go. When he goes in search of a cigarette it’s only a distant idea, an abstract longing, but luck’s on his side at the wrong time and he not only finds a stray one in his jacket pocket but he’s got his lighter, too, and he sighs out the first lungful of smoke with a relish, focusing on the process itself rather than the way his heart’s still pounding against his ribs, on the way that his brain thinks that maybe he’ll turn into a ghost, a puff of smoke, and he’ll never have to go back in there and feel so close to snapping back, ‘I _loved_ you, sir.’

The motion-activated bulb above his head flickers out; Kent’s bathed in darkness, the ambient light of the city beyond the station walls. He’s glad. He wants to be forgotten for a while. He wants to forget himself, to forget how much power Chandler has over him, to forget how deep in shit he is and has been and will be. Except he’s never had enough luck and the scarred station doors clatter open again, a crash in the night, and he can’t help but flinch.

Kent’s got enough sense to swear under his breath, but not enough to stub out the cigarette while he still can. Instead he shoves it between his teeth and buries his hands in his pockets; if he fancied being optimistic then he’d try and hold his chin up, still defiant, still standing his ground. Except he’s not, he’s fled, and he’s very much flattened himself against the wall, hoping desperately that whoever’s there doesn’t see. People in this station know too much about him already, about the sobbing in the loos, about the scars and the painkillers, about the lovelorn looks that still haven’t stopped.

Dread settles in his throat as the footsteps approach his seclusion; he knows the rhythm, the weight. He’d know Chandler’s gait anywhere. He’d know that one of Chandler’s gaits anywhere, actually, because it’s the one he adopts when he’s grabbed on to a purpose and is holding fast and that’s the one that always brought desire pooling in Kent’s stomach, the one that he’s imagined one to many times as the instigating factor, the last sound he hears before he’s distracted by the fantasy of Chandler’s mouth. This time he presses his skull back into the brick, the grout, and tries to ignore the strange way it still happens. He still _wants_. He can’t tell if he wants to anymore.

It doesn’t matter, does it? What he wants. This is it, now.

He learnt long ago how to take a hit and one more tonight won’t matter.

The wait for Chandler to round the corner stretches so long and then Kent wonders if he imagined the sound at all, but it’s when he’s contemplating turning that the lights splutter back to life. He glances towards the sky and would utter a prayer if he believed anything would hear him, but instead he watches dust float around the yellowed bulbs until the steps come to a stop nearby him.

Kent turns his head and finds his suspicions confirmed; it’s Chandler who’s standing there. His expression’s dangerously level, his jaw tight, and Kent only lets his eyes flit over him for a moment. He doesn’t trust himself to do any more than that, and he can’t tell if he’s more likely to barrel Chandler against the wall and crush their mouths together or shout abuse at his impassive face. He can’t tell which is worse. 

So he does nothing.

The movement in shadow that does happen is a shock that almost makes Kent lash out. Except it’s Chandler, and he whips the cigarette from Kent’s mouth in a single movement, too fast for Kent to follow, and crushes it beneath his heel. It knocks the breath out of Kent with hurt and surprise, and as tobacco flecks the pavement Chandler keeps his eyes on the concrete, his shoe. It’s all Kent can do to keep breathing, let alone formulate an answer to whatever question that was, whatever challenge it is.

When Chandler looks up again, they lock gazes. Kent sets his face in something he hopes is stony but Chandler outdoes him. The set of his mouth is so displeased, so _disappointed_ , that Kent wants to reach out and grab at his collar, shout at him that he doesn’t want to be out here either, that he doesn’t want to want to get out of that room every time he’s in there, that he doesn’t want to look at him and find that he hates him and aches for him at the same time anymore. Only he doesn’t do any of that, he just holds Chandler’s gaze and refuses to crumble in front of him.

That will, undoubtedly, come later.

Chandler looks away with a sharp sound and he doesn’t hang around. He stalks back around the corner, back into the station, leaving Kent to lean back against the wall and breathe out sharply through his nose, wishing that his skull had thudded a little harder against the brick. Maybe then he could go home, citing a throbbing headache, and just not deal with any of them until the morning. Except he can’t do that. His bloody pride tells him not to.

He shivers, swears, and marches back into the station.

*

He still stays late, some nights. He doesn’t know why, because Chandler barely acknowledges his presence, let alone talks to him. Sometimes Kent wonders if he knows he’s there at all. He worries about that when he’s not there, because if Chandler’s not noticing then there’s something wrong, something much worse than they’ve all feared. Doesn’t he know they care about him? Doesn’t he _know_?

Sometimes Kent wonders if he shouldn’t just tell him. 

But on those nights, just like on this one, he looks up from the paperwork and sees a blank face, a façade. He sees a detective inspector, not Joseph Chandler, hidden and safe behind glass. And even after that last display, that pseudo-confrontation, Kent feels for him. He shouldn’t, because they’re all being bastards to each other and they’re not tired of it yet, but he does.

And they can all tell, too. Riley had gathered him into a hug that night and rubbed his back in what he supposed, in his slightly stunned state, was supposed to be a reassuring way. Mansell had bought his round when they next went to the pub a couple of days later. And this morning Miles had stopped by his desk and said, ‘I’ve had a word with him, kid.’ Kent must have looked (appropriately, in his opinion) horrified because Miles quickly added ‘I’ve not said anything you wouldn’t,’ with a wink. It was no reassurance. He doesn’t entirely trust any of them anymore, and it’s making his mouth taste like ash and soil, making him wake in the middle of the night with dread settling heavy on his chest.

Kent stares, studies the curve of Chandler’s neck as he tilts his gaze to look at the underside of a page, because he knows he can. There’s no one else on his side of the room to comment and Chandler’s not going to notice, not when his gaze is so intent. Kent’s tired of wanting to kiss him. He still does, of course, every day, but he’s tired. So, so, _so_ tired. Hope has no respite. You’re not supposed to need it.

God, he needs it.

He gets up all of a sudden, spurred on by some unknown current, and grabs at his things. He takes enough care to slide the forms back into their folder but apart from that he leaves the desk as he found it; all that’s missing is his phone and his keys, both of which he slips into his coat pocket as he pushes the station door open with a shoulder. He walks towards his bike but doesn’t spare any more than a passing glance for it. Instead he makes for the pavement, Whitechapel proper, and walks.

There’s no real intended destination in his head; he’s only vaguely aware that he’s turned westwards and in the direction of the river. No matter where he ends up, if he can find the line of the river he’ll be all right, so he doesn’t think too much about anything except putting one foot in front of the other. He, like everyone else, keeps his head down, walks like he’s in a hurry. He’s not. He’s got nowhere to go and nowhere to be, not anymore, because the station may have felt like home once but it doesn’t, not anymore. No matter how much time he spends there. 

He probably knows London better by night, by now. It’s barely evening but it’s already dark, winter’s curse, and he hunches into his coat every time the street channels wind in his direction. When he comes to a set of lights he waits not for the green man, but for a lull in the traffic; he still looks both ways. Just not particularly carefully.

The Blind Beggar’s behind him, throwing light on to the street, but he doesn’t look back. He can’t. It makes his scars twinge, brings bile to the back of his throat. He’d thought he’d finished with that, but all this… it’s all come back, every insecurity he’s ever had, every doubt and every shaky uncertainty. So he keeps his eyes forward, on the groups of students filing back to their accommodation and not on that pub, not on Chandler’s shadow.

He passes Aldgate East Station, huffs out a half-laugh like he always does as he turns on to Mansell Street although the feeling pricks at his eyes as well. Tower Bridge looms in the near distance as Kent slows his pace to something more like meandering and less like fleeing, luring cars and pedestrians alike towards the optimistic uplighting, the bright blue paint, the sheer grandiosity of it. A bit like a black hole, really, if you consulted a pessimist’s tour guide. 

A young couple pass him on the inside, chattering in a language Kent can’t quite place and grinning despite the cold, their arms linked and close. Kent doesn’t look at them for long, not with that lump in his throat, and instead his wandering attention lands on a nearby group of Americans who are pointing out London Bridge as if it’s within sight or worth seeing at all. He considers calling out and setting them right, just in case they’re using the bridge as some sort of landmark on the way to somewhere else, but as usual he waits just a little too long.

(Well, it’s not his fault if they start looking for Borough Market in Shad Thames, is it? And hadn’t Miles told him to stop stockpiling other people’s blame?)

Kent keeps walking. The keep of the Tower, assurgent and bone-white in the night, is a world away from the iron and glass buildings at his shoulder. He can’t help but remember that the Krays’ eyes looked out of that fortress, the last imprisoned, and it sends shudder down Kent’s spine although they had close to nothing to do with what happened to him. The eyes that did that looked out at him from their own holding cells and he walks with more intent towards the river, towards the light.

He sidesteps the people climbing up the piss-soaked stairs from the bankside and makes his way along the pedestrian walkways; when he catches sight of his reflection in the darkened windows of the seemingly permanent exhibition space, he veers out along the segments of the bridge that curve out over the Thames and stops.

London keeps on going. It isn’t late enough to be quiet—if it ever is—and it feels like a hundred people push past him in those few moments, weaving across the cracking pavements. Each conversation is a wisp of character, a suggestion. He doesn’t care—he can’t anymore. If he did he might just break. Instead he tries to focus on the sigh of the river upon the mudflats and lets his restless gaze fall on the lights around him as he leans against the bridge wall, bending slightly over its breadth as he crosses his arms against the wind. Everything has its name: the jagged tip of the Shard, the low curve of City Hall, the swell of the Gherkin on the opposite bank. The ghost of every metal-solid building is interrupted by a rippling current and softly lapping waves. There’s anonymity anywhere, Kent supposes, if you look.

He leans against the stone balustrade and is reminded of the pack of cigarettes in his pocket as they press against his side; he leans back on his feet, suddenly desperate to find out whether or not his subconscious had enough sense to make him pick up a lighter, too, and if that’s a breath of relief that escapes him when he finds one he’s not got to justify it to anyone. He lights up with a speed that’s probably telling, sucking in a breath to distract himself from the way his hands are shaking, from the way he can’t stop thinking that the last set of fingers that prised a cigarette from between his lips was Chandler’s.

Denying his feelings has been an exercise in futility for months—years, probably, if he sat down and actually added it all up. He loves Chandler with all his heart and soul and probably some bits of his spleen, but it’s the sort of love that grips him around the throat and it _hurts_. Kent coughs around his own smoke and wonders if that’s another bloody metaphor, his own body telling him that he’s being an idiot and not just about the cigarettes. Chandler’s far more entrenched in his system than those. He wants to give up—he wishes he could give up. But he’s tried, and he can’t, and he’s come to the conclusion that he’s royally fucked and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.

Kent takes a deep breath and savours the ache of winter and smoke in his lungs. The usually murky Thames looks black and silver in the night, glinting softly beneath his feet, his suspended solid ground. He slips a little away from his gnawing thoughts and focuses on the way the wind manages to sneak its way into his coat, the way he catches brief glimpses of the people scurrying or ambling behind him, the way the tip of his cigarette flares. Anything’s better than thinking of Chandler sat in his office, in the station with the skeleton staff, and wondering if any of them can do something to make it better. Or easier. Probably not. None of them moonlight as Father Time.

Once or twice he thinks he sees someone he knows; it’s not unusual, it’s London and he’s run into people in more out-of-the-way places than halfway across Tower Bridge. But it’s the achingly familiar sweep of blonde hair that makes him lean back, one hand still curled around the edge of the stone, and catch a firmer sight of that line of coat and collar that he’d recognise anywhere. Even here, amidst the shock and the smoke around his shoulders and the people, but the object of his recognition disappears into the scene so quickly and completely that Kent turns back to the river again. There have been weirder coincidences.

It’s only when he half-spots him again, out of the corner of his other eye, that he realises he’s waiting. In the wings, so to speak.

Kent drags a hand over his face. He’d left Chandler sat in the station for a reason—he’s sure he did, even if he’s not entirely confident of the specific details—but there’s no chance of leaving this without seeing what brought Chandler out here without just walking away and he’s terrible at that, Chandler notwithstanding. It’s too out of place just to leave, and even if he’d like to, there’s a tugging between his ribs that tells him not to let it go. He allows himself another breath of his cigarette as he waits for a slight lull in foot traffic; it doesn’t come very quickly but he waits nonetheless. 

He braves an irritable, ‘I know you’re there,’ when there’s a long enough pause.

It’s guaranteed that he either looks like an idiot (at best) or a madman (at worst) but Kent narrows his eyes and peers around the closest corner that casts a shadow large enough to linger in.

‘I know it’s you,’ he says, resigned, as the red lining of Chandler’s favourite coat glints like something soft and supple in the low light.

There’s the rush of a sigh that Kent would know anywhere, then Chandler appears out of the stream of the crowd, hands in his coat pockets and a scarf tucked neatly along the lapels. The back of Kent’s neck suddenly feels chilled; goosebumps prickle at his skin as he turns back towards the Thames, exposing the flesh to the world. Kent leans on the edge, armed crossed below the elbow, the flare of the cigarette between his fingers faltering in the wind. Chandler doesn’t bother arranging himself upwind this time; he stands beside Kent, careful to keep well clear of the bridge’s brickwork.

‘You’re really not supposed to use that GPS check on my mobile unless you absolutely have to,’ Kent says, tapping the ashes into the Thames.

‘I didn’t think you’d answer the phone.’

He’s half right. Kent would have answered—he always answers—but he wouldn’t have wanted to. But what captures most of his attention is that there’s a quality of irrationality to Chandler’s voice. As if, at some point recently, he’s been worried. Kent can’t think why—beyond the obvious—and that should probably feel more like normality than anything else by now.

Kent’s tempted to say ‘You could have tried, sir,’ and although he means more than just ringing him if he wanted something and although it could be considered insubordination, he does. 

Chandler might nod, his mouth set in a self-deprecating line, but Kent’s learnt not to trust what he sees out of the corner of his eye. He takes another drag instead of replying, breathing out the smoke with a grim expression that has neither origin nor target.

There’s a pointed sniff that follows. Kent ignores Chandler, because of course it’s Chandler, and he’s inordinately glad for this ill-advised ritual because otherwise he’d have nothing to do with his hands and who knows what he’d let slip then?

‘You left…’ Chandler tips his head, as if he’s looking for the right word. ‘Rather abruptly.’

They lapse into an uncomfortable silence. Chandler’s staring down at the patterns in the stone now, sliding his gaze back towards the north bank when Kent doesn’t immediately reply. Kent allows himself a moment’s glance and watches as Chandler swallows; when his gaze lingers on Chandler’s skin, the crook of his jaw, his mouth, and the way the light plays against his face, he forces himself to look away. His eyes resettle on the museum ship and despite its size and heft he doesn’t really see it.

‘I didn’t think you’d notice, sir,’ he admits, quietly.

For a moment he wonders if Chandler’s heard at all, but when he turns to check he finds that the DI’s already looking at him, his expression veiled but there’s something wide-eyed about it. Kent would know. He’s studied Chandler’s face enough.

Then the wind picks up and it ruffles more than Kent’s hair. Chandler whips his gaze back towards nothing in particular. If Kent was allowing himself closer looks then he might have thought there’s a slight rise of colour to Chandler’s skin, the sliver of the back of his neck that’s still visible. But it’s probably just the light and he isn’t looking.

‘I do.’ Chandler clears his throat and looks down at the glow of the lights on the water. He sounds a little like he’s trying to convince himself.  ‘I do notice.’

Kent nods softly although he doesn’t agree. Whatever Chandler thinks he notices, it can’t possibly be everything. Or very much at all, from Kent’s experience. He’s still pondering which bits Chandler thinks he knows when he notices that his cigarette’s gone out. He curses under his breath and it’s probably that that makes Chandler turn back to him with a slight start, his expression searching for the sudden sentiment’s origin. Kent holds the cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he pats his pockets; he used his lighter not ten minutes ago but he can’t quite remember where he tucked it. Not with Chandler’s warmth stood next to him, watching.

It’s in his trouser pocket, as it turns out, and he lights up again with a trained flick of fire _._ He blinks away the afterimage of the flame, the flare, instead of meeting Chandler’s gaze. Mansell’s right. He’s not happy about it. But what right does he have? 

(Every. Kent knows.)

Chandler doesn’t immediately exercise any of them. He stands, straight-backed, as Kent leans forward and listens to a group of tourists pass them. Their carefree amazement at the city during the night feels worlds away from the stalemate he and Chandler are stood in. They’re all just waiting for something to happen, aren’t they? For the break, the split. Kent feels a bit sick whenever he thinks about it but it’s starting to feel more and more like Chandler won’t be in Whitechapel for much longer. He’s trying, but they all try, and they don’t always succeed. 

‘Those things will kill you.’

Kent doesn’t look at Chandler, not even with the concern in his voice, the soft insistence that suggests he thinks he’s about to be told off. Kent considers it for a second, because he’s heard all this before and he doesn’t need a memory of Chandler doing it too, but in the end he just sighs.

‘Weighing up the options, sir…’ Kent pauses, returning the cigarette to his mouth. He ponderously exhales his smoke, then flicks his dark eyes up to meet Chandler’s light ones. ‘I think it’s likely something else will get me first.’

As they speak to each other the wind blows their words back in their faces; Kent tastes his own bitterness, tinged with singed air. He doesn’t mean to chastise—not really—but Chandler’s face goes slack and surprised at Kent’s tone. 

Kent looks away, suddenly wishing to be somewhere else. ‘Is there anything in particular you wanted me for, sir?’

Chandler shakes his head. Kent doesn’t see but he feels it, hears the rustle of slight movement. He shouldn’t be able to but he’s always been hyperaware when it comes to Chandler. It’s one of his many curses. Sometimes he still thinks he can feel Chandler’s hand on his back, the splay of his palm, from that day in the cinema with Salter. Except he can’t, because that memory is little more than a hazy spin of seconds, and Chandler’s hands are firmly buried in his pockets now.

‘In that case,’ Kent says, trying not to think of the curve of Chandler’s fingers as he steps back from the edge. ‘Good night, sir.’


	3. Chapter 3

Kent’s starting to wonder if they aren’t looking too much into this case. He’s not supposed to think that, because he’s a detective and it’s supposed to be anathema, but he can’t help but ponder the possibility that Alexander Larson’s death may have been an unintended byproduct of a mugging. He’d been walking home through Weavers Fields—he must have been, because Llewellyn’s already said he was killed there, not moved, and that there was a struggle—at night. He’d been alone. He’d been drinking. And, from what they can tell, he wouldn’t be the sort of man to just let it happen, to hand over his phone and wallet when asked. He’d have fought, which they’ve seen cause an escalation from theft to murder a hundred times before.

Chandler’s listened to them make that argument more than once, but he won’t accept it. Not yet. He’s almost gone back to how he had been after the Ripper, questioning anything and everything routine that they touch. He’s running them all hard and himself probably even more so. Kent’s face falls when he arrives at his desk and finds a new file positioned next to his keyboard, Chandler’s neat print on a sticky note asking him to look in to it. He’d thought he’d be thrilled to find his name written in Chandler’s hand, but all it means is that the DI’s been working far too late again and it brings a prickly lump to Kent’s throat. 

He pulls his coat off with a vehemence that he reserves for when his mind’s betrayed him—because he shouldn’t care this much, not after all this, not after this long—but he retains a cigarette and doesn’t bother sitting down. He’s technically not on the clock yet, after all. He can afford ten minutes for an unhurried smoke.

No one stops him to chat in the hallways and even if they’d tried, he’d have shrugged them off. He hasn’t had enough caffeine for this, not yet, but he can have a coffee at his desk and he’ll never hear the end of it if he has a smoke later rather than now. He leans against the scarred station door and walks outside, along the same pavement he just covered walking in, until he finds a patch of sun that highlights the degradation of the concrete, the flaking paint that marks out each parking space. He leans against the station wall, just beside one of the ailing windows that desperately needs either a wipe or a replacement pane, and resists the urge to kick the small gathering of dried leaves at his feet as he lights up. He wants to, he wants to channel this nebulous feeling into something, whether that be chaotic movement or a throbbing set of toes, but he doesn’t. He’s not a child. He’s not. No matter what the rest of them might say. 

The click and flash of a cigarette alights no interest in the immediate area. Kent’s glad; he doesn’t particularly want a spectacle. Actually, he can’t decide what the hell it is he wants, about anything, but he’ll take that little frisson of satisfaction. No others are forthcoming, after all. He’s got a day of distant work ahead, of paper-thin camaraderie between the lot of them, an evening of wondering if anything’s likely to change tomorrow. It’s more than a bit shit, but apparently it’s his lot in life, so he’d better get used to it. Used to the waiting, anyway. Time’s supposed to soothe most wounds, isn’t it?

His phone buzzes against his ribs. He digs it out, scowling; it’s Erica. _Chin up, little brother_. He only has to press a single letter before his phone fills in the rest of the reply for him: _Piss off._ She always does this, thinks words like that help. Thinks the familiar jokes help no matter the timing. He’s never been a morning person; she knows that. She also knows that’s the least of his problems.

The troubling thing is that he doesn’t know what the most pressing of his problems is, either. He can’t settle on the criteria that makes one trouble worse than the others, or better. They all wrap together into a single Gordian knot, the solutions teetering between cutting and untying, any interference pulling at the ends of a rope that just makes everything tighter, more permanent. Muddling through doesn’t seem to be working this time. And maybe it’s existential flu, but Kent’s beginning to wonder if it ever has.

He breathes out a tight lungful of smoke and tries not to ponder it; he did that enough last night. He’s spent enough time lying in bed, staring at the opposite wall as the light slowly creeps in, to amass what’s starting to feel like considerable sleep debt. Standing outside in the cold long enough for his fingers to go numb will keep him on his toes. He hopes so, anyway. Except he’s not been very good at that lately, and oh, _shit_ , he’s just proved his concerns right.

The stride’s familiar, as is the approaching silhouette; it doesn’t escape Kent’s notice that he’s stood in the same place that he had been that night, for that wordless altercation, and now Chandler’s approaching from the opposite direction. It’d be a stretch of a metaphor to hope that the reversal applies to Chandler’s mindset, too, but Kent doesn’t dwell on it. Instead he endeavours to look as unassuming as possible. There are enough plainclothes officers in the station for misidentification to be possible. Especially at a distance.

But, of course, Chandler notices him; it’d be hard not to. He cuts a dark figure in the envelope of his suit against the light walls and they’re policemen. They’re trained to notice a silhouette when it’s not supposed to be there. 

Kent pretends he hasn’t noticed as a last resort. He turns his head in the opposite direction and pensively returns the cigarette to his mouth, as if this is something he’s done every morning of their acquaintance and it’s nothing either of them should concern themselves with. Except he’s never been very good at not looking at Chandler when he’s in the vicinity.

He chances a glance, sees him approaching, and swears at the gravel. Maybe Chandler hears, or maybe something else in Kent’s demeanor puts him off because he stops short, glancing between Kent and the station doors as if he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. Nothing is the answer to that question, as far as Kent’s concerned, but he still watches him out of the corner of his eye until Chandler shuts his eyes for a moment, takes a breath, and Kent braces himself for whatever this is, this time.

‘Do you have to smoke those?’ Chandler asks, his voice oddly resigned. 

‘No.’ 

_But I don’t bend to your every whim either,_ he thinks, sighing out the smoke.

(Another part of him thinks, _I would, if you asked, if you wanted,_ but he bats that part of his mind into submission the same way he always does.) 

Chandler doesn’t immediately reply, and Kent doesn’t want him to. He wants to be left alone for the last—he checks his watch—four minutes he has before the shift, except Chandler doesn’t move either. He stands there, looking at the brick to the left of Kent’s head in a way that makes him vaguely worried that the building’s about to come down on top of him. You never know—the state it’s in, it might. And it would be just Kent’s luck.

He feels hyperaware smoking in front of Chandler now. Hyper-vigilant, as if he’s about to tear this cigarette out of his hand as well. But Chandler’s hands venture nowhere near him; instead the one Kent can see curls in and out of a fist, his long fingers cradling the air. Kent knows he’s thinking—though about what is a mystery, as bloody usual—and he’s tempted just to go back inside if all he’s going to get out of this strange altercation is a blank expression on Chandler’s face, his body carefully and eerily inert. Chandler, stood still, can make a sloth look agitated and nervy, and it makes Kent want to put his hands on him for the comfort of knowing his heart’s still beating, that his lungs are still working.

But Kent has pulled himself away from that brink a hundred times and he keeps his hands to himself, shoving one in his pocket for safe keeping and resigning the other to holding the cigarette away from his side, the tendrils of smoke trailing upwards and dissipating against the brick. Chandler shakes his head slightly, and Kent’s ready for the wave of guilt and grief that usually comes with Chandler’s disappointment, except:

'I won't kiss you if you've been smoking.'

'You won't kiss me anyway.'

'Won't I?'

Kent’s gaze snaps suddenly to Chandler’s face; he looks about as horrified as Kent feels. Except Kent actually feels as if his stomach’s dropped halfway through the earth’s mantle, because he can’t believe those words came out of either of their mouths. He’s struck dumb with the shock of speaking out loud what he’s only allowed himself to think. Years and years of keeping mum about it, spending the small amount of conversations about his feelings for Chandler strictly within the comfortable limits of insinuation and implication, and they’ve just thrown it out there now. He’s handed over an agreement, an affirmation, that he’d never meant to give away. All the words just blurred together, weapons on either side of a court. He’d been ready, sprung, for Chandler’s next comment and reacted instinctually, with the first bitter feeling that lapped at his tongue. 

His hand’s shaking, the cigarette useless between his trembling fingers. _Fuck_.

He tries to take a deep breath but it doesn’t work; he dares to look back at Chandler instead of the opposite wall, and the alarm’s tucked safely away behind another of his careful faces, the blank ones he keeps for when it’s all falling down around them. Kent wonders if this what people mean when the say that the earth shifts on its axis, when they know, somehow, that the world’s just changed irreparably. Something cold and slick settles in Kent’s middle—his stomach feels a little like water—and he doesn’t return the smouldering cigarette to his mouth, not while Chandler’s jaw braces for saying something. Anything. As much as Kent wants the ground to swallow him whole, to envelop him in the peace of oblivion, he knows Chandler well enough to know they can’t leave it like this.

‘Air yourself out before you come back into the incident room.’

Chandler’s voice is so hard, so severe, that it’s only when he’s out of sight that Kent manages a, ‘Yes, sir.’

*

For once, he doesn’t choose to say at the station past end of shift. He’s forced to, held hostage by the expectation of a call from a far-flung timezone. It’s a long shot, but Larson had some correspondence on his computer that made them look twice. All to do with his work, and according to his supervisor all above board, but Chandler had said that they’d be the judge of that. Apparently, he’d meant Kent would be, because he’s the one who’s spent the majority of the evening sat next to a silent phone. Not that he couldn’t have done it, because he’s still sat at his desk too, but Kent’s not about to kick up a fuss about that. Not after this morning.

The words still burn the inside of his lips, his tongue, the top of his mouth. He can’t believe he spat them out so easily, stripped himself bare with a single breath. Chandler’s voice batters the inside of his head, his mind trying to put it all in order, make sense of everything so that they end up in the place they started when he emerges from the other end of the tunnel. Except he can’t make any of that stick, and the sudden ringing of the phone startles him so strongly that he knocks a pile of reference papers askew.

He doesn’t listen as closely to the call as he probably should, though he can still tell that there’s nothing dodgy about these particular dealings. What is concerning is the way he holds the handset to his ear for a moment too long after the other end’s put theirs down, the way he stares at the notes he’s made in a way that feels eerily detached, like that’s not his handwriting he’s looking at. He huffs and sets about clearing a space between his elbows among the witness statements and forensic reports and scraps of paper with aborted ideas scrawled across them, crossed out and transferred to the whiteboards. The folder from the morning’s still there somewhere, though around lunchtime Kent hadn’t been able to stand the handwritten note and had chucked it, crumpled, in the bin.

The words play on his mind: _I won’t kiss you if you’ve been smoking_. They spiral around his circuitry, wreak havoc on his ability to concentrate. He’ll be halfway through writing an email then, suddenly, stop and stare at the opposite wall trying to make some sort of sense out of the echo of Chandler’s voice. It doesn’t help that they haven’t spoken since, not in any meaningful way beyond Chandler giving him a job to do and Kent nodding. There’s no context, no anchor. Kent doesn’t know where to start, not without margins or lines to stay within. They rubbed all those away with careless words—but Chandler’s never careless, _ever_. And it’s that thought that keeps materialising in the very forefront of his brain, seemingly pressing enough to interfere with his breathing. But he can never quite get to the point where he can hypothesise as to why Chandler said what he did.

It’s not as if anyone made him do it.

Kent can’t just sit there, twisting his hands together in his lap in never-ending circles and watching absolutely nothing arrive in his inbox. There are too many possibilities, too many old ones and too many new theories that have just popped into his head. He won’t be able to keep anything straight until he has some sort of answer, anything, just… acknowledgement that something’s happened. 

He’s almost unsure if anything happened at all, if he didn’t just imagine all that meaning they left strewn on the empty pavement between them, and Kent grips the edge of his desk as he gets to his feet just to remind him that the world is real. It might be unravelling at the edges, splitting at the seams, but it’s there and they are and he can’t sleep with his heart in his throat. It’s a good job that the door to Chandler’s office isn’t far. He only needs adrenaline to do this, then, not rational determination. 

He doesn’t knock; any hesitation and he’ll stop, turn back. He’s hovered behind too many closed doors with trembling fingers in his life to hope that anything else would happen if he tried that now. There’s no reaction from Chandler either as Kent barges through the door, hand heavy on the rapidly loosening handle—apart from perhaps the stilling of the hand over the computer mouse, so they both must know what this is about. They both know it defies convention and bypasses the usual politeness. They started this conversation this morning, before, and they haven’t stopped it. Not once. Not really.

'What's Miles told you?'

(It had to be him. It’s _always_ him. The man’s worse than his actual father when it comes to paternalistic meddling.)

'Nothing.' Chandler doesn’t even look up immediately; it’s as if they’ve both been waiting for this conversation all day, steeling themselves up for it. He looks up with a self-conscious shrug. 'It was Mansell, actually.’

Kent tries not to gawp. ‘ _Mansell_?’ 

'I, um…’ The offhand note in Chandler’s voice dies away quickly, making room for the discomfort. ‘I may have walked in halfway through an anecdote.'

'Oh.'

'He couldn't recover,’ Chandler finishes awkwardly.

'Right.'

Kent’s relatively confident that Mansell hadn’t even tried. He doesn’t really want to think of what Mansell might have come out with. Some variant of ‘Oh, sorry sir, I hadn’t realised you hadn’t already figured out that Kent’s gasping to shag you into the nearest mattress. Or the other way around. I’m sure he’s not bothered either way,’ probably. Or something about cigarettes and an oral fixation. He’s such a wealth of innuendo that it has to have been something remarkably terrible. Just his bloody luck.

Miles might be blunt but at least he selectively understands the value of subtlety. Mansell recognises it but decides to give it miss for the sake of shits and giggles. Perhaps there’d even been a _You do realise he’s been in love with you since day one, sir?_ as well, except Mansell’s only heard the stories and Kent knows it was later than that.

It’s all well and truly mangled now. He’s stood there in Chandler’s office nursing pent-up anxiety and aggravation that’s threatening to bubble over into something mad and unmanageable, waiting for an idea for what to do next to occur to him. There must be something—he can’t just stand here forever, after all—but Chandler’s watching him although he’s turned back towards whatever it was he was working on before. The adrenaline’s still in his system, still more potent than the blood in his veins, but it’s rushing towards nothing. All he can think is that he can’t stay here, he can’t look Chandler in the eye (never again, never) and he’s going to fucking eviscerate Mansell for this.

‘Right.’ A sharp exhalation escapes him. ‘I’m going to go and… do something I have to do.’

He winces almost before he finishes speaking, because that’s a bloody awful excuse to leave the room, but (strictly speaking) it is true. He gestures weakly over his shoulder and Chandler nods, once, before Kent turns to leave.

That lack of reaction, even now, is disappointing. Kent wants to shout and swear and ask what the hell he’s done to him, what he’s done to make his friends tear down the one job he’s ever really loved, what deity they’ve all offended to make them claw themselves apart, but he can’t, and he doesn’t dare. He snatches at his coat, ignoring the way the movement leaves the chair at an awkward angle, and marches through the station just desperate to get away.

Mansell: there’s a place to start. He’d punch him but the best he can do is a phone call. And, in even more proof that the universe wants to fuck him over, Kent doesn’t even have a decent place from which to shout at him. He can’t do it in the incident room, because then Chandler would hear; he can’t do it in his flat, either, because his flatmates would hear and they’d never give him any peace about it. He’s not got a car to act as a thin shield against the world, just a poxy Vespa that seemingly does nothing except break down and make him wear a helmet that makes phone calls impossible. But when Mansell needs a shouting at, he needs a shouting at, and Kent’s heart’s pounding and if he doesn’t shout at him then he might just end up snapping at the first person who asks him the time.

The brightness of his mobile stings his eyes as he walks into the darkness of the car park and thumbs through his contact list; Mansell’s name is dangerously close to Miles’ so he breathes out through his nose and waits until he’s leant against his usual wall before he presses the name. The tinny ringing is a welcome change from the ringing in his ears, although after the third or fourth time he’s starting to wonder whether or not it might be more use to go round to Mansell’s flat directly and throttle him there.

Then the line clicks.

‘What the fuck were you thinking, Mansell?’ he hisses, not bothered about greetings.

‘Kent?’

Mansell’s tone betrays not confusion but bewilderment; it’s not uncommon for Kent to ask that question of him, or others like it, but it is unusual for the situation to be so pressing that he has to ring him up after hours and abuse him over a telephone line. Kent takes advantage of the slight delay in comprehension—there’s no distant thumping of music in the background, though there might be something that sounds like football—and keeps on talking. 

‘You’re a complete arsehole, you know that?’

‘Yes, actually, but a little specificity would be useful…’

Kent groans at the comic tone in Mansell’s voice; he’s not in the bloody mood. ‘You know what you’ve done.’ 

‘You sound just like Eva.’

‘Well, unlike Eva, I don’t give a toss about where you stick your cock—‘ Mansell snorts, and it takes a little of the impact away, but Kent continues on regardless. ‘—but I would appreciate it if you could mind your fucking mouth.’ 

‘What are you on about?’

‘You told him,’ Kent says, pressing more emphasis on each successive word.

There’s a low sound of realisation, then something that sounds awfully like a chuckle. ‘Oh, _that_.’

Kent lets his head drop backwards against the brick, relishing the thud. ‘Yes, that.’

‘You’re welcome.’ 

Mansell sounds insufferably pleased with himself and that’s not why Kent rang him. He’s not just going to listen to him practicing being smug all the bloody time. But then again, he doesn’t particularly want to know the specifics of what was said, so he latches on to the frisson of anger and lets it colour his voice.

‘I’m nowhere near grateful.’

‘You will be.’

‘Fuck off.’

Mansell laughs, properly laughs, and Kent wants to punch him. ‘I may be a bastard, but I’m a clever bastard. You’ll thank me one day.’ 

‘You didn’t plan a bloody thing. He said you’d been halfway through an anecdote.’

‘I have an impeccable sense of timing.’

Kent scoffs. ‘You have an impeccable skill at being a first-class dickhead.’

‘Ah,’ Mansell pauses for effect. ‘But at least you recognise I’m first-class.’

‘Shitting bloody _fuck_ …’ Kent mutters, crossing an arm across his chest as the embarrassment washes over him again, more firmly this time, threatening a riptide. Chandler knows. And now he knows there’s no way to not know, to unlearn. There’s no way back. 

‘Come on, mate,’ Mansell says, and his tone’s strangely gentle (for him). ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’

‘Isn’t it?’

It’s not as if Kent expects the universe to crumble down around him. He knows he’s far too insignificant to do that. All that he’s certain off is that all these revelations can’t make their situation any better, only worse, and it’s already pretty bloody shit.

‘Listen to this.’ Mansell sounds like he thinks he’s handing over the Rosetta Stone, some precious method of translation. ‘The skipper told me he’d given the boss the number of some girl in SOCO—Lizzie, I think it was? She worked with us on those multiple mass killings, you remember? Apparently he even went on a date with her. Catastrophic, apparently, but they’re still civil.’

‘Oh, great. Civility.’ Not exactly what he’d hoped for. ‘Anyway, it’s not as if he has to work in the same room as her every day, he can afford half an hour’s awkwardness every other week—’ 

‘What I mean is—well, he likes you, doesn’t he?’

Kent doesn’t know, but apparently Mansell sees that as a rhetorical question.

‘You’re already a couple of steps ahead in the situation.’

Yeah, a couple of steps closer to the inevitable messy end, but Kent doesn’t say that. What he does say is ‘Yeah, well, I’m still pissed off,’ and when Mansell laughs as he asks _When aren’t you?,_ Kent tuts and ends the call with was much emphasis as a touchscreen allows. It isn’t a lot and it doesn’t make him feel any better. If he’d ever been the punching walls type, now might have been a time when he’d have indulged. But he doesn’t, he bangs his mobile against his chin instead, head tipped back against the brick until someone else crashes through the doors and he jumps.

Whoever it is, they go in the other direction, but it still doesn’t stop his heart from leaping into his throat and thudding hard. He lifts his hands from where he’s braced them against the wall and finds his fingers shaking; he’d have a smoke but he’s left his cigarettes inside and he’s not going back for them now, not after everything. He bites the inside of his cheek instead, trying to will his limbs to obey him, but it’s no use.

Kent shuts his eyes, burying his treacherous hands in his coat pockets, and after a moment’s self-deprecation, he goes in search of his useless Vespa.

*

The next few days pass without incident, even though Kent tenses at every suggestion of unease. Mansell keep shooting him smutty looks across the incident room, which doesn’t help, but Riley seems to be enjoying smacking him for it, so that’s something. Miles says nothing out of the ordinary, which is unusual, but a part of Kent hopes it’s because Chandler’s not said anything to him. At least he can keep a semblance of dignity, then, if that’s the case.

But he can’t be sure, and it’s driving him bloody mad.

It’s like being in limbo, like sodding _Ashes to Ashes_ , and the best way he’s found to cope is to seclude himself behind his desk, behind the mountainous pile of clerical work they have to get done. Filling in forms: essential to policing, essential to any case they hope to take to court, and not normally within the remit of a detective constable. He’d go out for a cigarette, because he’s spending more time tapping his biro against his opposite wrist than he is writing, but he’s not sure he’d be able to come back in once he’d left, so he sits, and writes, and waits.

It’s only when Miles comes along and leans against his desk, coat already on and asks, ‘Pub?’, that Kent realises he’s far too good at dawdling.

‘Think I’d best get this lot done, skip,’ he says, indicating with the page in his hand.

‘If you must. Though you look like you could do with a drink.’

Kent waves him off with a _Yeah, yeah, that’s what you always say_ , but watches them go. Riley looks over her shoulder once and winks, which Kent understands less the more he thinks about it, but he sets it aside eventually and gets back to the forms. He ploughs through them more quickly now—the sooner he can get home and sit there nursing a bottle of beer with a peeling label, wondering if he should start looking for a new job where he might be left in peace, the better. 

It’s when his phone goes, rattling against the tabletop, that he swears under his breath and looks up to find that Chandler’s appeared at the threshold that divides the incident room from his office. Kent doesn’t mean to but he ends up meeting Chandler’s eye accidentally; a glancing blow, but like any surprise jolt, it’s enough to knock his concentration askew.

‘Kent,’ Chandler says, drawing his attention back in his direction. ‘Could I have a word?’

He looks between his mobile and Chandler’s face, unsure of which to deal with first. His instinct is the phone, because all he has to do is switch off the screen and shove the thing in his pocket, but this is Chandler he’s looking at. The Chandler who’d said _Won’t I?_ and _He couldn’t recover_ and hadn’t done so much as give him an indirect order for days. And now he’s standing there, braced against the open doorway, with an expression that’s just about strange enough to be called nervous.

‘Please?’

Kent clumsily gets to his feet, a bit of the startle still in him; he curses himself and wishes he’d learnt at some point in his youth how to be smooth. Chandler always manages, God knows how, and it’s that thought that makes Kent worry his fingers as his steps echo through the empty incident room, his gaze skittering across the neat-enough desks instead of the open doorway. It’s a little like being called to the head teacher’s office, or hearing someone say _We need to talk_ in that soft, careful tone of voice _._ The same slight rise of nausea comes with each, and now it burns the back of his throat as he stands with his hands crossed in front of him.

Chandler’s already sat back down, occupying his usual space with his usual grace. ‘Could you shut the door?’

Something uneasy fingers its way up Kent’s spine; they’re alone in the incident room, so why would the door need shutting? He does it anyway, because at least it’s something to do that isn’t standing before Chandler’s desk waiting for something to be said. It doesn’t feel like it’s his place to start. Chandler asked him in here, pulled him away from his work (no matter how unnecessary it is), so he can set the pace. Define the subject, the parameters. Kent wouldn’t know where to begin.

There’s so much shit to wade through.

He doesn’t sit as he turns back to Chandler; he isn’t invited, either. This is it, then. It must be. Classic distancing, and there’s a sense of transiency that settles in Kent’s bones as he waits for the inevitable. It’s easier to leave when you’ve already got one foot out the door.

Chandler sighs, swallows, then says, ‘I wanted to clear up something I said to you the other day.’

‘It’s all right, sir.’ Kent answers quickly, too quickly, although he already knows where that gets him. ‘I’ll just forget about it—’

‘Do you want to forget about it?’ Chandler interrupts, his face set and determined. ‘I am prepared to not speak of it again, if that’s what you want.’ He falters, a little, with the extension of words. ‘Or we can speak of it again.’

Kent tries not to squeak. ‘Now?’

‘Not now, no.’

Chandler shakes his head along with the words, only a slight movement but he’s always been a man of subtle motion and Kent catches it because he’s spent so long looking. He can’t look away this time, but the exposed indulgence doesn’t matter, because Chandler’s studying the face of his watch as he gathers his thoughts. 

‘Don’t smoke for a week, then we’ll talk.’ Chandler pauses, looks up at him, eyes pale and watching. ‘Whichever you prefer.’

Kent stares at him, at the clasp of Chandler’s hands resting on the desk between them. He can barely comprehend the proposition, let alone decide which he prefers.

In the end he just says, ‘All right,’ because that challenge is a piece of piss and he really doesn’t care about the cigarettes anyway, not in the way Chandler seems to think he does. He doesn’t wait to see what Chandler’s reaction is to his agreement, either, because even before all the syllables are out of his mouth he’s turned on his heel to walk back towards his desk. There’s the slight creak of a chair that just might suggest that Chandler’s half-risen to try and stop him, for clarification or something like that, but Kent just slides between the table and his chair and digs his half-smoked pack out from a drawer and returns with it in hand.

The lights in Chandler’s office somehow stop feeling like that of the interview rooms; it’s soft, warm, and Kent takes a deep breath as he slides the packet across the clear wood. An offering, one of many he’s always been willing to make for Chandler, yet here they stand playing at what feels like dares. Perhaps it is, and as tender-shelled as Kent’s been feeling, he’s willing to do this. Even if the only thing it gets him is answers and nothing more, nothing like the resolution that fevers his dreams.

(And even if all this bravado only lasts him until he gets home, then it’ll be enough. He hopes.)

Chandler blinks owlishly at the pack under Kent’s hand, his eyes flicking up only once as Kent brings his arm back to his side. It’s an offering, a tribute of sorts, but if it means that Kent can convey how he feels about the gravity of this decision without having to put it into words, then it’ll do.

‘Proof,’ he says, nodding towards the desk, directing Chandler’s sudden uncertainty. ‘That I’ll keep my word.’ 

‘You could always just buy another.’ 

‘True. But I won’t.’ 

There’s no way Chandler can be sure of that, sure of Kent’s words, but the look he sends across the table says that he’s going to trust him. Or try to, at least, but Kent still wants to give a long exhalation of relief. He hasn’t realised he’s been breathing quite so shallowly, that he’s tensed up that much waiting for Chandler’s response. They feel a little closer now, in collusion; perhaps he’s even a little more ready for answers. 

Chandler picks up the pack, painfully unfamiliar, but plucks a single one out and offers it back to Kent. The cigarette looks wrong between his fingers.

‘One for the road.’ 

Kent swallows and it’s more difficult than he expects because his mouth has gone terribly dry. He still reaches out and takes the proffered item, careful to not let their fingertips slip too close to one another. He’ll smoke it later, hanging half out of his bedroom window, when his hands are shaking for an entirely different reason than Chandler thinks. It’s not the nicotine that keeps him coming back. It’s the need to cope, and even as he makes this decision, he’s not sure how he’ll manage to cope with the inevitable ramifications of whatever this is. 

He considers saying thanks, but swallows the urge down and says, ‘A week,’ instead. 

‘A week,’ Chandler repeats, with another nod.

Kent slips the cigarette into a pocket and, for a moment, wonders if he’s been dismissed. Then Chandler’s mobile rings and he knows he has been, so he turns and slips out of the office without a further word. Chandler’s voice murmurs through the space behind him, populating the otherwise empty incident room with cadence and inflection. Kent forces himself not to listen and try to muddle out who’s on the other end; it only really half works, because he feels himself calm when it becomes clear that it’s a call to do with the job.

Not that it should be comforting, because if they’ve just said what Kent thinks they’ve just said, then involvement with their work is no preclusion. But he’s not going to think about that, because he really should be getting home, and he needs to be able to keep his mind on the road. He doesn’t bother sitting down again, not even for the last half-filled in form.

The light from Chandler’s office spills across him as he switches off the last desk lamp, and he doesn’t risk looking back as he walks through the shadow towards the cool, clear night.


	4. Chapter 4

‘You don’t have to tell me twice about the rain, I got caught in it on the way back. Absolutely pissing it down. And when I got in it looked as if Jack had let a rampaging bull loose in the kitchen—oh, fuck, shit— _bollocks_.’

‘What?’

Kent heaves out a sigh. ‘It’s all right, it’s not the first time I’ve put the tea bag in the sink and the spoon in the bin.’

‘Twit,’ Erica says, laughing.

‘Yeah, well,’ Kent says, his tone dipping into something dark as he cradles the phone between his ear and shoulder in order to retrieve the cutlery. ‘I’m starting to wonder.’

He can hear her frown in the moment’s silence. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Kent doesn’t know the particulars, not really, no matter how long he thinks about it. That’s the problem: he just knows that something, somewhere, has gone a bit wrong. He’ll be damned if he knows what or where. He just knows where it’s ended up: this new limbo, except this time it’s more like the Styx because he can see the opposite bank shrouded in mist, can hear Charon murmuring into his ear. It’s like being dropped nearby where you want to go, except it’s just out of sight and you can’t anchor yourself to figure out which direction to go in. Kent’s still not managed to get his bearings, but not for lack of trying.

‘To put it in a way you’d understand,’ he says, labouring over the sarcasm, ‘some weird shit’s been happening.’

‘Some weird shit’s always happening round your end.’

‘Yeah, well. This is a bit beyond that.’

‘You’d better spill, then. Before I get down there with my reporter’s hat on.’ 

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he says, laughing, knowing full well that she would. 

She doesn’t have to press to get him to talk. She just has to stay on the end of the line, with the familiar sound of the pips in the distant background as the hour turns. Kent vaguely wonders if having the news on counts as working from home for her, then shakes the thought away and redoubles his efforts into not allowing himself to veer off track.

‘It’s… well, it’s the boss.’

’St Jackass the Tedious?’

He’s surprised into a laugh. ‘That’s a new one.’

‘I’ve been thinking them up in staff meetings,’ Erica says, and there’s a glee in her voice that almost makes Kent feel as if there isn’t something very strange going on that he’s going to have to try and explain.

‘He, um… well. He said something.’

‘As do we all, at one point or another.’ 

‘Erica.’

‘Go on, I’m listening.’

And despite the tinny sound of the radio rattling on in the background on her end, Kent knows she is. She’s gone that sort of settled quiet that’s so rare on the both of them, and Kent almost doesn’t know what to say in the face of it. He doesn’t quite know where to start, or where the beginning actually was. There’s the long version that spans three years, then there’s this week. Somehow the latter feels like it needs more explaining.

‘Well, he ran into me when I was outside having a smoke before the shift.’

Erica makes that small tutting sound that she always does. She may know that it doesn’t make any sort of difference but she still disapproves.

‘And, um—‘ Kent’s not entirely sure how to describe it. ‘I may have been in an argumentative mood.’

‘Emerson Kent, what have you done?’

‘Nothing! Nothing, I swear.’ He says it with an insistence that would suggest certainty, though that feeling’s fragile and it fades quickly. ‘Nothing yet, anyway.'

‘Oh, God.’

It sounds like she’s smothered her face with a hand and it’s that, of all things, that makes Kent take a deep breath and just spit it all out, every  wretched detail.

‘One minute we were talking, then all of a sudden he’s saying he won’t kiss me if I’ve been smoking and before I know it I’ve said that he won’t kiss me anyway and—’

‘Oh, _God_.’

‘Yeah.’ Kent rubs at his forehead, leaning against the kitchen counter on his elbows. ‘He found out.’

'How?' 

‘Mansell.’

She’s heard enough about him to know what that tone means.

‘Bastard.’

‘Normally I’d agree with you, but I don’t think he put it on a placard and stood outside his office.’ Kent gives a short exhalation of amusement at the image, though his tone’s still sober. ‘It was honestly an accident.’ 

‘Yeah, right, whatever helps you sleep at night.’ Erica embodies Kent’s own doubt, but somehow makes it self-assured. ‘What happened after that, then? Anything? Or have you just both been sat at your desks paralyzed by the embarrassment you’ve brought upon yourselves?’

Kent’s wondered, once or twice, when he’s actually thought about how much he’d like a cigarette and how the last time he’d lapsed it was a lot easier to stop, whether or not that might have been better. They’re still immobilised with embarrassment, except there’s the looming danger of something unidentifiable on the horizon, and no matter what Chandler says Kent knows that nothing ever stops with talking things over. Everything goes somewhere. He’s at a loss for what that destination is, and it’s bloody terrifying. 

‘He called me into his office a couple of nights ago.’ Kent huffs out a lungful of air as he recalls the way his stomach had sunk. ‘I thought he was going to chuck me out.’

‘Didn’t he?’

Kent shoots the windowsill an ersatz miffed look. ‘No.’

‘That _is_ some weird shit,’ Erica says with a comically serious tone.

‘It gets worse.’ Kent manages a smile for a moment, because she does have a way of injecting cringe-worthy conversations with a bit of cheer, but it still falls away from his face sooner rather than later. ‘Or better. I’m not entirely sure.’

‘Seems to be a theme with him, Em.’

‘You’re not kidding,’ Kent says dryly. ‘He said we’d talk about what he’d said—’

Erica scoffs. ‘Bit cryptic.’

‘You know what he’s like.’

’No, I don’t. I’ve never met the man.’

‘Never mind that. He said that if I go a week without smoking, then we’d talk. About what we’d said.’ Kent wills himself to stop tapping his fingers against the counter, or wrapping and unwrapping touch from around his cooling tea. ‘And see where we go from there, I suppose.’

Erica hums, considering. Kent curses his tendency to fidget and forces himself to do something while she thinks, raise his mug to his mouth or adjust his grip on the mobile before it slips away from him. He never noticed it get this bad before, when he’d smoked then stopped (then smoked and stopped again), but he’d been busy then. A uniformed PC, always carrying out someone else’s orders. He hadn’t had the time or inclination to sit at home after the shift, staring at the shadows stretching on the walls, wondering about what exactly Chandler means to clarify.

‘Can’t say I entirely agree with the way he’s gone about it. It’s a bit… I don’t know. Domineering, I suppose,’ she says, eventually, when Kent’s halfway through wiping up water droplets from around the sink. ‘But, as far the sentiment… I can’t fault that.’

Kent sighs and considers letting his forehead thump against the closest cabinet. ‘You’re supposed to side with me.’

‘I am.’ There’s one of her you-should-know-what-I-mean pauses, then: ‘You don’t fool me. I know you still think he’s the dog’s bollocks.’

‘Yes, I know, I fucked up.’ Kent’s starting to think that’s the only way to explain falling in love with his boss and, all of a sudden, he’s far too tired to think about it. ‘Can we move on now?’

‘We certainly can’t,’ she says, indignant, although her tone softens. ‘I don’t think you did fuck up.’

Kent’s tempted to argue his point. He’s spent a lot of nights thinking it through, mulling it over, trying to trick himself into believing in a conclusion. Access—that's the problem. It’s too easy. Love opens the way for itself deep into the bone, all the way into the marrow, and it doesn't shut the door. Doesn’t even leave it on the latch. It’s like an exposed nerve in a tooth, an unsplinted broken limb, a sharp prod at a livid bruise. An injury like any other. And he’s seen love create enough horror.

‘Where’d you get that idea?’ 

‘I think he cares.’

‘God knows why.’

(Kent can’t decide whether he means God knows why she thinks that or God knows why Chandler cares.)

‘Em,’ she says, and she sighs in a way that she usually only does at films. ‘He’s bribing you into not smoking.’

Kent swallows heavily. He hasn’t pondered that option too much, although it’s occurred to him, because if this is bribery then the bribe must be… well, he can imagine. He’s spent years imagining, guiltily. His mouth goes dry at the mere suggestion, and he gulps at his tea.

‘Now, either that means he thinks you’re more useful to his team if you aren’t hacking up a lung every time you need to chase after someone,’ she continues. ‘Or he’s invested for a more personal reason.’

‘I’d wager on the first.’

‘Shut it, little brother,’ she says, the mock-vitriol laced with affection. ‘I know what it’s like to watch someone you love doing something stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ Kent murmurs, toying aimlessly with the cardboard box of teabags that never quite closes, running his thumb over the badly-ripped perforated edge until he can’t feel it anymore. ‘I know, too.’

Chandler going into the ring with Jimmy Brooks. Chandler stalking around that house, hunting a mass murderer. Chandler walking out in front of a gunman. Kent’s heart lurches into his mouth every time he thinks about them, even now, about how even if he’d tried he wouldn’t have had a chance at convincing him not to do any of it. Once or twice, after the Bogeyman case, he’d dreamt of that day, on that road, Chandler with his hands up. It’s just how it was, down to the terror that had sat low in his throat and the wind on his face, until the sniper hits Chandler instead; he’d woken as if doused with cold water, sitting up so fast it hurt, gasping.

‘When was this, anyway?’ Erica asks, her voice inquisitive. She recognises the character of the silence. 

Kent clears his throat. ‘Thursday.’

‘You’re halfway through, then.’ 

‘Yup.’

‘And have you had a cigarette?’

He should be proud of being able to say that no, he hasn’t, if only to make that tone in her voice go away, but a wash of embarrassment pools over him. It had seemed liked a decent gesture at the time. Chandler had certainly seemed to appreciate its dedication.

‘I, um—I may have given him all of mine.’

She cackles. ‘Safekeeping?’

‘More or less.’

Well, it’s not like Chandler’s going to smoke them. Kent’s never been that possessive about them, actually, and even if Chandler did Kent doesn’t think he’d be bothered to tell him off. Chandler can have what he wants of him. He’s known that for a while, now, but he’s still not quite decided how deeply fucked that makes him.

‘Do you want to go out and get drunk?’

Kent snorts, rescuing some sarky humour from his suddenly maudlin mood. ‘Oh, yes, because getting drunk’s always a good idea.’

‘In my experience,’ Erica says, the smile evident in her voice.

It’s almost tempting, the thought that he could gulp at something and feel his brain yield, yet he doesn’t want to sit there, waiting for the whole sad weight of the drink to hit him. But he doesn’t want to sit in the flat, either, looking at where he’s left that last cigarette on his bedside table. He hadn’t smoked it, in the end. He’d just looked at it and wondered what the hell everything meant. Then that hadn’t worked, and it’d been three in the morning with the prospect of another shift hovering just behind dawn. It had taken an hour on the internet and a cup of tea to get him back to sleep that time. The other nights it hadn’t mattered, because even they have days off and he could sleep in until midday if he absolutely had to. Then he’d been so shattered by his off-kilter sleep schedule and the demands of shifts at a police station that it really hadn’t mattered.

‘There’s still time,’ Erica prompts.

‘I think I’ll pass for once,’ Kent says, with a sigh. ‘I’m just going to go to bed. Early shift tomorrow.’

She makes a sympathetic sound. ‘All right. Just try not to look like a lovesick sheep pining after a nice patch of grass in the morning.’

‘I think I can _just about_ manage that.’

‘And lay off the sad bastard albums. You’ll still want your eardrums even if nothing ever happens.’

‘Damn.’ Kent pours all of his pent-up sarcasm into the word. ‘And there I was, planning on listening to all of them on full volume until I fell asleep.’

’Sod off, y’bastard,’ Erica says, fighting back a laugh. Kent smiles into the dregs of his tea and tries to take a drink—it’s freezing, and he pulls a face as he pours the liquid into the sink.

‘And if anything happens,’ she continues, with a warning in her voice. ‘I’m the first to know.’

She needn’t push about a lot of things, because they have implicit understandings, but that is the one thing she always insists on. She always says. Always reminds him, although he never forgets.

‘You generally are,’ Kent says, feeling reassured for the first time in days.

*

He’s thankful for a rare night of solid sleep, for wading through records is immensely less painful when you’re rested. Kent wouldn’t describe himself as well-rested, not yet, but he’s bought himself a little more time for lucid contemplation. If he could only get the chance. His brain’s a bit too busy keeping all the figures in line as he goes through Larson’s bank records, trying to work out where the small spikes in funds are coming from. They’re barely worth noting—not large amounts, nothing that screams blackmail or dodgy dealings—but note them he will. If this bloody highlighter doesn’t die before the end of the page.

Kent lets his eyes flicker towards Chandler when the man’s phone goes, ringing only once before the mobile’s at his ear. He’s been stealing these small glances at periodic intervals, just in case there’s something significant to be seen. Occasionally he’s wondered if he’s spotted Chandler’s fingers hovering around the edges of _that_ drawer, the one that holds him to his word, but he’d just conjured up the years-old dream-memory of Chandler’s touch skimming over his skin like that and had to look away, to stare hard at the surface of his desk until his heart released its hold on his throat and returned to its prison behind his ribs.

He jumps when one of their phones rings, then again when Chandler emerges from his office with what, for him, constitutes a bit of a clatter. There’s no explanation, either, and he strides through the incident room without so much as a word for any of them. He could have spared a glance, because they all looked up from their papers, but he keeps his gaze forward until he’s out of earshot.

‘What’s that about, d’you reckon?’

Miles poses the question to the room at large. Kent would assume it’s rhetorical, but the atmosphere’s slipped slightly since the weekend, and the rest of the team are starting to lighten up a little, cautiously testing out their old stomping grounds again. The curious quality to Miles’ voice is telling—before he would’ve just asked _What’s got into him?_ or _Careful, the boss is going on a silent rampage again_. The others would have laughed, too, instead of peering after Chandler until he disappears down the stairs and they turn back to the files.

‘Dunno, skip,’ Mansell says with a shrug, turning a page. ‘You’re the old school copper. Aren’t you recording this?’

‘I wonder what fodder for blackmailing you he’d have if he was, Mansell.’

Riley’s tone is warm, softening the obvious joke, but not quite as light-hearted as it was. Whatever had been pulled taut between them all before hadn’t snapped, but simply been loosened; you’d think that would minimise the fallout, make the recovery easier, but all Kent feels is the distinct lack of resolution. They’re sat in the middle of a ceasefire and he’s standing fast amidst closed-door negotiations, waiting to see what will give first: his need for answers or Chandler’s willingness to explain himself.

‘Anyway,’ she continues, ignoring the sour look Mansell shoots across the room. ‘Our skipper does everything by the book.’

‘Oi, I’ve bent a few rules in my time.’

Mansell tuts. ‘Yeah, and I bend spoons with my mind in my spare time.’

Miles looks as if he has half a mind to say something in response, but he doesn’t get the chance. Chandler walks back in, leaving the glass door to the office to fall shut behind him, and the tightness of his expression harks back to those first few days, to whenever something happened and he couldn’t battle down the irritation. For such a controlled man, he’s got a revelatory face, and Kent can’t help but listen to what it says. But this time when he looks he finds that Chandler’s walking towards him, towards his desk, and he sits up a little straighter.

‘Sir?’ he asks, pen poised over his notepad.

(He’s going to ignore the way Miles is watching him from around Chandler’s elbow; it’s making his skin crawl but just about anything uncomfortable can manage that.)

‘Clara Vincent’s in reception.’

Kent’s not sure how he’s supposed to react to that. ‘Oh?’

‘She’s asking for you.’ 

‘Me?’

Ah, well. That’ll be it. It’s not abnormal, per se, for witnesses to ask to speak to a specific officer, but Clara Vincent’s a sensitive spot in this investigation and Kent can still hear that argument play out in the back of his head. Kent doesn’t like the way the memory makes him bristle, still, but he also doesn’t like the way it makes Chandler’s mouth set in that stern line.

Chandler nods, then sighs and says, ‘She’s adamant.’

‘I, um—all right, I guess.’ 

Chandler’s already walking back to his office when Kent gets to his feet, quickly tidying his papers in accordance with their clear-desk policy. Kent doesn’t watch him, no matter how much he wants to see if he can glimpse any sort of indication (however infinitesimal) as to what the DI’s thinking, and he doesn’t turn to the rest of them either. He knows they know something’s shifted in the atmosphere, but he’s got no answer as to what, so he can’t field their questions very well yet.

Kent retraces Chandler’s steps, heaving the door open and jogging down the stairs with one hand hovering above the iron banister. He pushes the ever-present confusion to one side—it hovers, lingers, but keeps its mouth shut—and sets about looking for Clara, spotting her face and seeing if he can see anything revealing in it. Or anything familiar. It won’t be the first time they can play Snap with expressions. 

She’s standing in reception, leaning on the edge of the front desk with two packets of cigarettes in her right hand and a curious expression on her face that managed to make her seem both wary and wry. Kent quirks a small smile as she notices him and straightens her stance.

‘Miss Vincent,’ he says, offering his hand.

‘I’m glad I got your name right.’ Her handshake is quick but firm. ‘I’m never sure if I remember what people are called.’

‘Is that anything to do with why you’re here now?’ 

A mixture of expressions play across her face, none lingering long enough for Kent to get a decent look. Instead her gaze flickers between the duty sergeant and the revolving doors.

‘D’you mind if we walk?’

‘No,’ he says, gesturing towards the doors. ‘That’s fine. After you.’

The cold air outside is almost a shock; someone in the station’s managed to convince the heating to work, for once, and they almost forget the temperature outside when there aren’t that many windows from which to watch the many and various methods of keeping winter out of your coat. Clara’s got a black leather jacket curled around her like an armored shell and Kent considers doubling back for his own coat, but she’s crossing her arms and striding down the street so he decides otherwise. This has to be about something, after all, and he’s not about to let what could be a very small window for answers pass. He jogs a little to catch up with her and tries to ignore the way the sky’s looking like it might break at any moment.

‘Sorry. I, um…’ She glances back at him as they cross the street. ‘Well, I work behind a sort of desk, don’t I? I know they’ll listen. And if I’m going to do this then I want to speak freely.’

‘Is that why you asked for me, specifically?’

‘Yeah.’ She smiles, a little sheepish, then asks, ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

Kent shakes his head. This is his job. 

‘Thanks. You seemed all right, when you spoke to me last.’

‘Got something against the rozzers, have you?’

Clara laughs. ‘Yeah, you’re all right. Come on, in here.’ 

They duck into a small grassy square; it’s near enough to lunchtime that there are enough people walking through, though not as many simply milling about. That’s probably for the best, because they would constitute accidental eavesdroppers and would probably make the effort of coming out here null and void. Clara makes for the closest bench, swiping the abandoned crisp packet off the seat and dropping it into the nearest bin before sitting down edged all the way up to one metal arm. Kent stands opposite, waiting, as she drops the cigarettes in her lap and takes a moment to pull her hair around one side of her head, out of the wind.

‘Here,’ she says after a moment, motioning with one of the packs. ‘I figured I owed you.’ 

‘Thank you, but no.’

‘Come on, your boss isn’t hovering at his heels this time.’ She grins, a split-second expression that makes her look like an entirely different girl. ‘On-duty or not, it’s only me who’d tell.’

‘No, really.’ Kent bites at the inside of his cheek. ‘I can’t.’

‘Your girlfriend finally pester you into stopping?’

‘No. Not girlfriend, no.’

‘I see. I hope he’s worth it.’ She eyes him for a moment, then holds the dull metal lighter to the cigarette in her mouth. ‘We all deserve to nurture our vices.’

Kent might as well be; he seems to have walked straight away from any virtues he ever had. He’s got enough reasons: _perhaps it’s more you than you think_ , leaving the door open, the shard in her chest, the lost look in Chandler’s eyes, the way they’ve all fallen apart and been put back together in ways that don’t make any sense, the promise he’s only half sure Chandler made to him.

And yet here he is, refusing a smoke.

‘I don’t—I’m not sure,’ he says, eventually, sighing and glancing back towards the road through a gap in the hedge. ‘It’s complicated.’

Half her mouth curls into a despondent smile. ‘That’s not always better, you know.’

‘I’m not sure I’m looking for better.’

(Just something.)

‘Then you’re a decent bloke. Your boss, on the other hand…’ Clara motions vaguely with a hand, pulling a dubious expression.

‘He’s not having an easy time of it at the moment.’

‘Are any of us?’ she asks, the overload of smoke spilling from her lips in grey puffs.

Kent doesn’t have an answer to that. He’s tempted to say no, because there’s always something going on. His mother would just shake her head and say if it’s not one thing it’s another. She’d never liked it when he’d said he’d rather it be something else, anything else, but he still thinks it now, sighing as he sits heavily next to Clara. She huffs a little, like Miles does when he knows he’s asked an unanswerable question, and holds the cigarette away from her body and folds her legs beneath her, balancing on the bench.

‘What was it that you wanted to tell me, then?’ Kent asks, watching a pigeon peck at the stone cloak of a nearby statue.

‘About Alex…’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s not about him, exactly,’ she says, waving a hand to deter his suddenly eager demeanour. ‘It’s just… someone came in the pub yesterday asking for him.’

‘You ever seen them before?’

‘No, never.’ She shakes her head, blows smoke into the air. ‘He didn’t stick around for more than one drink, either.’

That’s not strictly unusual—not everyone goes as hard as Mansell every night, after all—though there’s something alarmed about her that sets Kent on edge. She worries the loose edges on her ripped jeans, alternating between pulling at the soft remnants of worn cotton with her free hand and smoothing down the fringe against the skin of her knee.

‘What did he want?’

‘Just asked if Alex had been in recently. Said it was about some job, that he’d know what it was about if I told him Gary was asking after him.’ She shrugs a single shoulder and runs a nail along the edge of her lip. ‘When I said he hadn’t, I don’t think he believed me.’

‘You didn’t tell him Alex is dead?’

‘I didn’t like to.’ Her sideways glance says it all: _it’d be dangerous to._ ‘Anyway, it wasn’t a lie, strictly speaking.’

Kent cocks his head in a half-nod; he can’t disagree with that.

‘He was…’ Smoke creeps from between her fingers as she considers the description; Kent’s almost tempted to rescind his previous refusal of her offer. ‘He was very smooth.’

‘Not keen on smooth.’

‘No, me neither.’ A smile tempts Clara’s mouth, but the shuddering memory overtakes it. ‘So smooth he was almost slimy.’

‘I know the type,’ Kent says on a sigh, looking back towards the green.

She laughs once, although there’s little humour in it. ‘Thought you might.’

Kent doesn’t say that he doesn’t strictly mean people he’s come into contact with through the job. You’d expect that much. There are enough slimeballs, after all, though Miles has saltier names for that lot. It’s just that he seems to have a talent for attracting them in the rest of his life, too: Erica’s ex-fiancé, a string of bad choices for relationships, a really bloody awful skipper his first year on the force. You’d think he’d be able to spot them a mile off. 

‘Anything else you can tell me about him?’ 

‘I know I’m not supposed to, but…’ She hands the cigarette over for a moment and unzips several of the pockets on her jacket; it’s in the third that she finds what she’s looking for and exchanges a folded slip of paper for the smoke. ‘That’s a copy of the receipt. The name on the card came up as Gary Finch.’

Kent takes the paper from her hands and curves it around an extended finger. ‘And that means nothing to you?’

‘I don’t know him, if that’s what you mean.’ She fixes him with a firm sideways look. ‘Alex never mentioned many names to me, either. It wasn’t the sort of thing we talked about.’

No, he supposes it wasn’t. Chandler might think differently, might wonder what on earth they talked about at all, in that case, but Kent’s been around the block a few times now and he knows enough to stand by his original stance. Anything can sound suspicious when posed in the right way, or put to the right person.   

‘I could probably get you the security footage, too, if you needed,’ she continues. ‘Jerry owes me a favour for all the shifts I’ve been covering.’

‘That probably won’t be necessary.’ It’s nice to know, though, and Kent reminds himself to mention the offer to Chandler. ‘This is very helpful, Miss Vincent.’

‘Clara.’

Kent doesn’t correct himself this time, only nods. ‘I’ll be in touch if anything comes up.’

‘You’ve got my number.’

She smiles at him as he gets to his feet, as close to a laugh as she can probably get. She’s worrying the skin around her nails on her free hand, twitching the cigarette in her other as to trim the ash, and Kent knows that even if she’s doing this for the good of the investigation it can’t be easy. He wonders if it’s hit her yet—if she’s cried. Maybe she has. He doesn’t dare ask.

‘Good luck with your… what did you call them?’ Clara ponders terms for a moment, not really asking for Kent’s input. ‘Complications.’

He lets out an exhalation of laughter at that, and a ‘Thanks.’

It’s enough of a goodbye. Kent leaves her there, in the square, finishing her cigarette. The heat stings as he walks through reception, his hands almost numb as he runs one through his hair, ruffling the back as an afterthought as he slips through the doors to the incident room.Miles looks up from where he’s adding information to the whiteboards and gives him a nod; other than that no one seems to take much notice of his return.

Nothing and no one in the room’s shifted. Kent might know that they’ve got something now, something that’s new, but he wants to do half an hour’s digging before presenting anything. Running a check of their databases is standard; he might as well do it. Kent settles back at his desk and sets the thin paper before him, curling at the ends. He gets the chance to unlock his computer screen but only barely manages to enter his password before Chandler’s out of his office again, walking towards him instead of the whiteboards.

Kent resists the urge to swear through his teeth. He should have known—Chandler notices everything, he notices when someone’s plucked a photo from the whiteboards for a closer look then put it back, no matter how carefully they’ve done it—and now the familiar flutter of panic arrives in his breast, the same spluttering bird that battered against his ribcage when he’d come home late and find his parents still awake, still likely to smell smoke on his hair and his clothes and his underage skin. Except he doesn’t want to think about his parents in the same thought as he does Chandler and, _God_ , he doesn’t want to ruin five days of dedication with a misunderstanding. He’d flapped his coat around a bit on the way back in, but that’s done fuck all, apparently. He hadn’t really expected it to but he’s the master of false hope.

Chandler should know that it was more likely to be her than him. He’d seen them talking on that first day of the case, and he’d been the first one to go out and meet her, after all, and they’ve already established that he’s a details man. He wouldn’t have missed the fact that she was the one with the packets, not Kent. And he should know, by now, that Kent keeps his word. He does as he’s asked. He wouldn’t break a promise that ostentatiously. Not to him.

The DI comes to a stop before Kent’s desk, his expression more veiled than it had been the last time he’d stood there, not even an hour before. At almost any other time in the past three years Kent would have been thrilled for such frequent attention; now the look on Chandler’s face forecasts something disappointed, resignation to a let-down he’d hoped he wouldn’t see. 

‘Kent—‘

‘I don’t smoke menthols.’

Chandler opens and closes his mouth, as if he’d come to ask that exact question but still doesn’t know what to do with the answer. Kent resists the urge to glance up at him and smirk, pleased with the retort his subconscious had managed to spit out just in time; instead he waits for the system to log him back in, hyperaware of Chandler’s shadow falling across his shoulder. The clatter of the rest of the room continues. Someone gives the printer a good hit and it hisses to life. Riley catches Kent’s eye and mouths _Tea?_ while Mansell watches surreptitiously from the corner of the room.

He nods a grateful approval to the offer of tea and offers up a silent thanks that he’d remembered that small detail in the nick of time, when it had really mattered. He catches Mansell’s narrowed eyes, too, and his starting sliver of a smile, but he’s going to ignore that for the time being.

‘You can search me if you want, sir,’ Kent says, glancing up as the screen alights and settles on the Met’s standard desktop.

‘That, um—that won’t be necessary.’

Chandler goes very red as he slinks away. This time Kent lets himself watch, sharing a slightly false look of overdone confusion with Riley as they catch eyes from across the room. They don’t know that he knows what it means, or thinks he does. It’s another piece in the puzzle, sure, but he’s missing the lid and can’t be sure of the pattern. But, like a Rorschach print, there’s an image in the splatter. It just depends how you look at it.

So, this time, Kent watches. It’s what they’re trained to do—to notice. Chandler sits down behind his desk with a bodily sigh, bracing both elbows against the surface for a moment before reaching for the neat tub of Tiger Balm sat in its place in the pattern. He breathes deeply again as he rubs circles into his skin; Kent wonders if that air grounds him, keeps him on the straight and narrow. He wonders if Chandler would share it.

For the first time, a very small voice in the back of Kent’s brain murmurs, _He might. He might._

Chandler’s eyes flick up again as his fingers still against his temples; they go straight towards Kent and his own open gaze.

Kent swallows and lets his own eyes fall away from Chandler’s, towards the desk and the receipt flattened against the wood between his palms. He ignores the frisson of arousal that comes with the implication and sets about searching for Gary Finch on every database they have.

*

The case, like so many of theirs, ends up anticlimactic. Gary Finch is well known to the Drugs Squad, and his mere presence in their paperwork mandates a handover. Part of an ongoing investigation into a supply ring, apparently. A few seconded uniforms swoop down on the incident room and collect all their papers, packing them into boxes to be taken to the third floor. Chandler’s not happy about it but he doesn’t go through the same pageantry as he did last time another department encroached on his territory. Instead he stands at the threshold of his office, hands in his pockets, watching as the files disappear one box at a time. When the doors slam shut for the last time he turns away from the array of strangely empty desks. Kent doesn’t want to watch, not really, but he can’t help but catch glimpses of him sitting down, pinching at the bridge of his nose, presumably steeling himself for the inevitable report. 

Not much else happens all afternoon, not even as it slides into evening. They tidy up the incident room without Chandler even asking and by the time the sun’s down the place is spotless. Except for the black hole that’s Mansell’s desk, but even Chandler had written that off as a lost cause months ago. When they’re finished Kent sits down and rings Clara Vincent; it’s not strictly protocol but he’d rather let her know that the investigation’s been handed over and that if she gets a call from the Met it’s not going to be him on the other end of the phone. She thanks him, says, ‘Well, at least it won’t be your Inspector, either,’ and Kent stares at the phone after he puts it down, wondering whether they’re all seeing something he’s not.

He sits there for ages waiting for some sort of sign. The rest of them file out as they finish off their paperwork—Miles first, because he can fill these pages in his sleep now, then Mansell, because he probably reckons he can do them first thing tomorrow, then Riley, because she actually double-checks hers. Kent dawdles, spends a long three minutes contemplating which of two boxes to tick.

At one point he’d almost convinced himself Chandler had forgotten their de facto agreement, then Ed had burst into the incident room with some mad idea about extra archive staff and he realised that they weren’t alone, not quite yet. For a brief moment he and Chandler lock gazes through glass and he almost smiles, because this is mental and there’s nothing else to do except that, but he doesn’t get a chance. Ed’s commandeered his attention and that’s that. The paperwork beckons, and it’s easier to fill things in than it is to think about the inevitable.

‘You all right, Kent?’ Ed asks when he emerges from the office, peering over at Kent’s illuminated desk.

‘Yeah,’ he replies, trying to hide the way he jumped slightly at the intrusion. ‘Just, um, a headache. And, you know, paperwork.’ 

Ed pulls a face that says, yes, he knows, and he pats Kent’s shoulder with what feels like a very distant solidarity. The touch prickles as Ed swoops out of the room and down the stares; Kent hates this hypersensitivity, the heightened awareness. He feels vaguely like prey, like there’s something hiding just out of his line of sight, except Chandler’s actually standing right there, leaning out into the room and bathed in warm light. 

‘Kent,’ he says, soft and careful, before nodding into the sanctum of his office.

For a mad moment Kent wishes that Mansell was still sat at the next desk over so that, just perhaps, he could shoot a glance in that direction and get something brazen-faced and scandalised in return to amuse him on the long walk to Chandler’s desk. Because although it only takes him about three long strides (and he’d chosen that desk for that express reason, when they’d last done the change around, and he’s regretted it more than once) it feels like a damn long walk and he’d rather think about Mansell’s stupid expressions than what’s about to come next. He’s spent a week wondering what’s going to come next. That’s been more difficult than the no cigarettes because at least he can occupy his hands with other things, other distractions. He can’t reroute his thoughts.

And, at the current count, possible negative outcomes for this conversation outnumber positive ones by about three.

Kent turns to close the door behind him with what probably amounts to excessive care, but it stops him from having to look at Chandler’s face for another few moments and if he can do that, then he will, because he’s a fucking coward and he’s known that for years. Maybe a week ago he would have stood there and tried to say _Fuck it_ with his expression and his easy handover of the vice Chandler thought he was forcing him to break, but now… he’s had far too long to think. They all have.

‘Sit down, please,’ Chandler says, indicating a chair.

The formality only serves to make Kent more unsure of himself. He briefly wonders if he can trust himself to sit down without somehow missing the chair entirely, but by the time he’s got to the end of the thought he’s sat down and he can’t remember doing it. He’s more perched than anything else, back straight and taut, his fingers twisted and resting against his knees. He’s veering towards flight already, poised to leave the minute this carefully orchestrated chat goes wrong.

‘Do you actually have a headache?’ Chandler asks, and his hand hovers around the handle of a drawer.

Kent shakes his head. ‘It was just something to say.’

Chandler nods and the hand returns to the surface of the desk. Kent tries not to watch the way his fingers flex, the tendons shifting between flexion and extension as he adjusts the alignment of the neat file between them, but it’s tempting and it’s so much easier than looking at Chandler’s face. Not that he seems to be particularly insistent on looking at Kent’s own, for whenever Kent does force himself to meet Chandler’s eye he finds him studying the labelling, the typeface that spells out Met Police, Whitechapel Division.

‘Are you all right?’ Kent suddenly asks, the words out of his mouth before he can think better of them. ‘About the case, I mean.’

‘Oh.’ Chandler frowns a little. ‘There’s nothing to be done, I suppose.’

That’s never stopped him from being bothered before, but Kent doesn’t say that. Instead he nods and waits for whatever it is Chandler had wanted to say. He’d been the one to propose this conversation, after all. Kent had only agreed. 

Chandler clears his throat. ‘It’s been a week.’ 

Kent hums, nods a little. He’s well aware. It’s weighed on his mind since that morning, when he’d rolled out of bed and known that something would change by the time he got back in it. And the intermingling of dread and exhilaration urge him on even now, as he digs around in a pocket and slides the cigarette back across Chandler’s desk.

Chandler looks at it for a moment, a small furrow appearing between his brows that Kent watches with his heart in his throat, then he returns his hand to another desk drawer and produces the matching packet. He lines them up, each a line of white against the depth of dark wood, and Kent lets him even as the silence stretches thin. He’d carried that cigarette around all day, just to test his resolve in the crescendo.

‘That was your free pass,’ Chandler says eventually, his tone betraying confusion.

‘As I said,’ Kent says, tilting his head slightly, ‘I don’t smoke. Not regularly.’

A slight, momentary half-smile slips across Chandler’s face, almost as if he doesn’t believe Kent’s explanations but he’ll listen to them anyway, just for the sake of it. Kent’s seconds away from bristling when the expression disappears and leaves something much more grave lying across Chandler’s features.

‘I couldn’t understand,’ Chandler says, slowly, as if he’s still confounded, ‘why it bothered me so much.’

He means the smoking, clearly. He’s staring at the cigarette, the loud warning label, the scuff on the edge of the box’s pattern that Kent had caught with a fingernail and ripped when opening it, all as if they might decide to tell him what’s going on. Kent doesn’t know either. Chandler hasn’t seemed that bothered about any of them recently. He hasn’t even seemed that bothered about himself, much to Miles’ chagrin, though he had thrown himself into the work.

‘I do not have the luxury of being able to blame my feelings on overlong shifts.’

A wave of retrograde embarrassment washes over Kent. ‘I think you did that day, sir.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Chandler says, quickly, looking to Kent’s eyes then flicking his gaze away again. ‘Those are not… the feelings that I’m referring to.’

It’s Kent’s turn to frown: Chandler’s eyes are not those of a coward, yet they are scared. He’s never seen him scared before, and his implication in it makes him flush with a power he’s not sure he wants. Not sure he’s ever wanted. He certainly doesn’t want it now, when he’s rather sure he can’t carry the situation on his own. He doesn’t even know what the situation _is_ , not really.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kent says, ‘I don’t quite understand—‘ 

‘About a month ago,’ Chandler says suddenly, keeping his eyes on the desk for the sake of the words. ‘Miles told me I should open my eyes.’

Kent will strangle that man one day. Or try to, then get boxed around the ears for his trouble. Miles has shoved him in so much shit over the years, things he says are for his own good, but this takes the bloody cake. He said he hadn’t said anything Kent wouldn’t. Should’ve known the man’s a conniving liar when he wants to be.

‘He said you were furious with me—’

Kent finds himself interrupting. ‘Not just you.’

In fact, not at all him. If Chandler’s not oversimplifying the time frame, then by that point Kent knows his anger was mostly directed at himself. At everything he felt, at everything he wanted to feel and didn’t, at everything he didn’t want to feel and did, at not being able to tell the difference between the two. Anger about not being able to do anything. About not being allowed to do anything. 

‘Maybe not, but I wasn’t helping.’ Chandler gives a small, self-deprecating smile to him, and Kent doesn’t quite know what to do with it. ‘Anyway, he said you were furious with me, but that I should be able to see what you did for me despite that. And what it meant.’

Kent’s face burns as Chandler watches him through those words, through the implication. He knows he’s obvious. That’s why everyone bloody well knows, and it’s only by some strange stroke of luck and unhappy chance that Chandler is as oblivious as he is. Or, was, apparently. 

‘He said—’ Chandler cuts himself off and gives a disbelieving laugh. ‘He said you had something more than trust. A bad case of loyalty, I think were his exact words.’

Kent can’t disagree, because that’s exactly what it felt like. Trust Miles to have a way with words. Then again, he’s always had a lot to say about this sort of thing.

‘I don’t think any of us blamed you, sir—‘

‘I think we can set aside the “sir,” now, this far behind the lines,’ Chandler says. 

‘I didn’t blame you,’ Kent says, after a pause. Words feel strange without the honorific. ‘It was just… difficult. It shouldn’t have been, you had—have—every right, it’s understandable…’ 

The problem is that it isn’t palatable. People drown, quietly before their eyes, all the time, and Kent had been terrified that no one would be able to jump in and pull Chandler back to the air, the atmosphere. Kent would have tried without hesitation but even that certainty aroused fear in him, the very real possibility that he’d flounder as well, splutter and slip underwater halfway back to shore. He’s spent months being scared of what might happen. To all of them.

But Kent can’t think of how to say that, how to wrangle the nebulous feeling into the right words, so he lets the trailed-off sentence stand. 

‘Just because my pain was understandable,’ Chandler says, as he stares at the pack of cigarettes he’s aligning, bracketing with the long stretch of his thumb and forefinger, ‘it doesn’t mean that my behaviour was acceptable.’

Kent wonders if he’s supposed to disagree here. He almost does. He can’t blame Chandler for anything he felt—he couldn’t blame anyone for that, not after he’s had such an extended experience of feelings he didn’t want to have. No matter what Miles says, you can’t just buck up and get on with it. Or you might be able to go through the motions, but there’s still the voice in your head.

‘And my pigheadedness doesn’t make your actions unacceptable, either.’ 

The very teenage impulse to bristle and say that he doesn’t need his redemption, thank you very much, wells up in Kent’s chest. He ignores it, although it laps at the back of his tongue, because Chandler’s trying so hard and it’s written all over his face.

‘I was unfair.’ Chandler takes a moment to pause, to think. ‘To everyone.’ And another. ‘To you, especially.’

Kent sucks in a breath. He’d been sure, those first couple of days, that Chandler blamed him for her death. That he associated his face with her blood. He’d mentioned it to Miles on a Chandler-less evening in the pub and been told to pull himself together and stop being a bloody idiot, that he’d done nothing that broke protocol. But here they sit with the tinge of regret in Chandler’s voice that implies just enough, and Kent sits through the stab of sadness with as much stoicism as he can muster.

‘I didn’t—’

‘You can blame me,’ Kent interrupts. He almost wants him to, now. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I didn’t _think_ , Emerson.’

Chandler says it with such force that Kent’s eyes snap up to meet Chandler’s, to match their regret with surprise. Even the shock of the addition of his first name, crafted suddenly by the tongue and mouth and teeth he’s thought so much about, doesn’t erase the revelation of what Kent thinks Chandler means. 

‘I was angry,’ Chandler says, in calmer tones, as he sits forward. ‘I wanted to stay angry. It was… easier, that way.’

Kent knows the feeling. It was easier to tell himself that he was angry with Chandler—with what he’d done and hadn’t done, what he’d said and hadn’t said—than it was to admit how bloody painful it all was. How much it _hurt_. How much his heart throbbed when he lay awake at night, watching the slow dawn creep across his ceiling, trying to think if there’s anything he could have done to change how things went.

‘I had my suspicions. About you, and about me.’

In anyone else, those words might have prompted a gesture, a hand waved between their two bodies. With Chandler it does nothing. He keeps his hands flat against the desk, where they both can see them, and offers Kent a glance that perhaps—just perhaps—says more than any gesture.

‘I… wondered. For a while.’ He pauses, and Kent almost asks for more details, but he shakes his head and frowns slightly. ‘But I never would have believed the reciprocity myself if Mansell hadn’t said anything.’

Kent tries not to sound as shocked and breathless as he feels. ‘It was an open secret.’

‘I’m oblivious, clearly.’ Chandler tries a smile and it doesn’t stick, although it’s self-conscious and honest and Kent wants to look at it for hours. ‘But, it made me think. I opened my eyes. And these…’

He gestures to the cigarettes between them, so out of place in the topography of Chandler’s desk, and it seems as if neither of them can look at them for very long. A rush of embarrassment hangs around Kent’s shoulders at the remnant of his teenage years, of his first years on the force. It’s like finding an old and incriminating album among your music and being reminded of how very uncool you were and how cool you thought you were. Except Chandler doesn’t seem to notice any of this, doesn’t seem interested—he’s only interested in the past few weeks, the things he’s seen.

‘You were hurting yourself,’ he says, and his voice is suddenly rough as if he’s about to break or shout or do something other than murmur, ‘and I was just watching.’

Kent wants to say, _Snap, sir_ , but there’s another crack in Chandler’s veneer and he can’t bring himself to patch it up with ill-timed humour.

‘I know I have no right to make you do anything, not in a personal capacity,’ he says, falling back on his usual formality. ‘But I… I meant what I said. I just didn’t say it very well.’ 

The allegation sits in the silence between them. Kent wants to agree, say that everything they’ve said to each other recently has been obscured by a layer of bullshit, but he can’t tell if that’s just being honest or if that’s another lie, another layer.

‘Which bit?’ Kent asks, in the end.

‘All of them. I tried to say it several times. None better than the last.’

Kent knows frankness doesn’t come naturally to Chandler. Perhaps it doesn’t come easily to him, either, but he’s saved by being so painfully obvious that even his mother asks, occasionally, if anything’s gone on with that inspector of his. She phrases it as one would ask if anything’s gone on at work, but Kent knows what she means. The problem here is that he’s nowhere near as confident in his decoding of Chandler’s tone. All he can do is think back through everything, through _I didn’t know you smoked_ to _I notice, I do notice_ to _Won’t I?,_ and wonder which holds the overriding importance.

‘So,’ he says, carefully, trying not to do himself the injustice of blushing. ‘You didn’t just say that for the sake of it.’

Chandler shakes his head.

‘Then why now?’ 

It seems like a shit time to do anything, let alone _that_ —promise a kiss to a man who you work with when the department’s already swarming with rumours of internal investigations. Offer up his soft underbelly when they’re all playing with knives.

‘I came to the conclusion that there’s no good time to do this.’ He glances down at where he’s nudging some papers back into a neat pile with a knuckle. ‘Not when I’m involved.’

Kent can’t disagree. He’s been waiting for the right time for three years—the right time to say something, the right time to drop a hint that’s a little more than a gaze that lasts too long or a night spent sat in the incident room working but not speaking—and there’s no opportunity. There’s always something else, and it’s not just Chandler. They’ve all got their problems.

‘I didn’t think I would handle it very well, either,’ Chandler continues, his voice quieter but no gentler.

There’s nothing to say to that. Kent wants to, because he never wants to hear Chandler turn on himself again, because he knows that the rasp of a cat’s tongue might only be a soft pain but feel it often enough and it stings, but he can’t string any words together, let alone the right ones.

Chandler looks at him then, properly looks, and his mouth is so unsure. ‘I’ve not handled anything very well, have I?’

Kent doesn’t dare to answer. He doesn’t know anymore. Once he would have taken a guess—probably that Chandler would handle it well, of course he would, he knows Chandler would—but now there is absolutely no levity in Chandler’s voice and he’s looking at Kent for an answer, for direction. His cool blue eyes are wide and warm in the low light, searching Kent’s face with something akin to apprehension, and for a split second Kent almost reaches over and lifts his hand from where he’s pressed his palm against the surface of the desk.

But he waits too long and Chandler moves his head in a tiny, fretful shake as if trying to pitch his thoughts away. ‘I’m sorry.' 

‘Don’t apologise.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘No, no,’ Kent says, leaning forward and hooking his fingers around the edge of the desk; they can’t lose all this ground. ‘It’s fine. I thought we’d already established that I don’t mind.’

More than that, actually. He’d have given his left hand for Chandler to turn to him for answers, to pose questions that ask for comfort rather than reports on the case. He’d wanted nothing more than to help, to care beyond distant contemplation, to be able to just sit there and tell Chandler that he’s there for him, and he’d be there for him even if all he needs is someone to sit with him in the empty station. Kent can’t see why that’s such a difficult concept for Chandler to understand.

‘Don’t you?’

‘I gave you the cigarettes, didn’t I?’ 

Kent gives the pack a significant glance, prompting Chandler to do the same. Their eyes meet somewhere in the intersection of looking up again, and there’s a hint of comprehension in Chandler’s expression. Kent offers up the corner of a smile, just a quirk of his lips, but Chandler’s gaze flickers across his face and there’s something dawning in his brain. Kent struggles not to blush.

‘You did.’ 

Chandler’s voice is sure, all of a sudden, the same tone as he adopts when they realise something critical. When everything starts making sense. Kent feels the flare of a terrible, wild, lawless desire, and as much as he wants to pattern Chandler’s collarbone with suck marks and give in to all that wanting, he draws blood from his mouth and sits quite still with his hands in his lap.

‘So, knowing all that,’ Chandler says, bracing his hands on the desk as if he’s readying to stand up. ‘Will you come with me?’

Something in Kent lurches; the feeling gets worse as he gets older, but it always means the same thing. Chandler makes no attempt to clarify the question, so Kent’s still staring into the mist, waiting to stumble over his destination, blindly waving in the dark. It’s not right, it’s no way to make a decision (especially not this one), but Kent’s heartbeat thuds against his jugular and he knows that it would take more self-convincing to  make him refuse than to get him to agree, and maybe that means something. 

‘Yes,’ he says, eventually, getting to his feet. ‘All right.’


	5. Chapter 5

The drive’s no more awkward than the one to the crossroads had been. Though that’s probably because it’s shorter, lacking enough time for Kent to whirl himself into a second fluster before he’s stepping through a door to a building he’s walked past before and never realised he’d been that close to Chandler’s flat, murmuring a thanks to Chandler for holding it open. They’ve passed some unspoken point, some unmarked threshold, and that’s probably why Kent doesn’t flinch as the door to the flat clicks shut behind them.

Chandler barely rests; he goes through the motions of anyone who’s just come home, pottering about from one room to another, illuminating the place one lamp at a time. Maybe on another day Kent might have looked around and felt scruffy; tonight he’s too far gone, too preoccupied for such indulgences. Chandler sheds layers at a speed that feels precarious, his coat and jacket going to their homes one after another, and Kent just stands there.

There’s clearly a ritual in play here but Kent can’t tell which parts to partake in. In the end he surrenders his coat, only because Chandler returns in just his shirtsleeves, looking very much as he had in Buchan’s house on that afternoon (just without the bruises), to find Kent still stood there with his hands in his pockets. They just look at each other for a moment, deciding on something (Kent’s not sure what, not even now) until Chandler motions for his coat. Kent sighs and hands it over, treading further into the impeccable space of the flat as Chandler doubles back to hang his coat at the door.

Kent can’t tell what room they end up in—he’s used to older houses, converted flats, where each room has four walls and a door, not this large space that just merges from one function to another—but they’re there, in opposite corners, oscillating between watching and waiting.

‘When did you start?’ Chandler asks, his voice lower than it had been in the car. ‘Smoking.’ 

‘I don’t know, really.’ He hadn’t exactly marked the date. ‘Must’ve been school. Behind the bike sheds, you know?’

But Chandler just looks at him, and Kent supposes that no, he doesn’t know.

His eyes keep flicking to his mouth, snagging when Kent wets his lips and thinks of what else he did behind the bike sheds, as if he knows where his thoughts have gone. Now’s about the time when Chandler should really be offering him a drink, or a cup of tea, or something, but no offer comes. An unsettling thought occurs to Kent: they’re circling one another, careful and quiet, something more suggestive thrumming beneath. He almost feel his pulse pick up, desperate for what Chandler’s going to do to him, the possibility and promise stuck in his mind like a splinter. The calm they keep is dangerous and on the brink of snapping.

‘I never really properly started,’ he continues, his mouth suddenly very dry.

‘Properly?’ 

‘I mean, I’ve never ticked the box for smoker on any form I’ve filled in.’ He quirks his mouth in what might be a smile, but ends up shrugging when Chandler’s gaze is too intense for flippancy. ‘It was never a permanent thing.’

‘What was it, then?’

’Something to do.’ Kent answers, then thinks. ‘In a crisis.’ He laughs, once, letting his gaze settle on the wall behind Chandler’s head. ‘Not my terminology, by the way.’

His thoughts are racing, his heart lagging behind; he can’t think and he doesn’t want to try, not when his blood’s rushing somewhere other than his brain as Chandler steps far enough into his space to signify intent. Kent takes a shallow breath, and another, because he’s either never seen Chandler like this before or he’s not looked enough because as much as he tries he can’t tear his eyes away from his mouth, from the way the slight part of his lips basically tells him what’s going to happen next. It’s just a matter of whether he wants to let it happen.

Well, he agreed to this arrangement, didn’t he? He knew a week ago this was coming, he knew it as a nagging in the back of his brain, an annoying twinge of lust at the certainty of suggestion. He saw it in the way Chandler looked at him, the way he flushed, the way he went overly formal. He just never quite believed it, because he’d believed for so long and then… well. Then everything had happened.

‘That doesn’t sound like a very convincing reason.’

Chandler’s voice is low, almost a warning. A challenge? Kent can’t tell; desire coils low in his stomach, wraps around his throat much as the love has, and Chandler’s standing too close and he’s licking his lips and they’re on the cusp of it all, aren’t they?

‘I suppose it’s not,’ he says eventually. 

‘Then why do it to yourself?’

Kent shrugs. ‘It’s only my body. It’ll let me go one day.’

‘Oh.’

Chandler stands, silent and shocked, behind that single syllable. Kent remains before him, every bit of him that’s vulnerable to a knife or a skilled press of fingers open, and he stays there knowing that he wouldn’t be able to react in time. And he doesn’t, not really, because for all their cautious stillness Chandler can move very quickly when he wants to. He breathes Kent’s name with a tinge of sadness and suddenlyhe’s all quivering hands and desperation, a hard press of mouth and a terrified intake of breath all at once; Kent holds fast because it’s all he can do not to be the same and _God_ Chandler’s kissing him and it’s not at all what he’d thought was going to happen. Except it’s exactly what he knew was going to happen, because why else would they have come back to his flat?

Kent decides quickly that he doesn’t care. He just wants to feel Chandler against him like he is now, frantic, like he’s chain-smoking kisses, lighting the next with the one they haven’t quite yet finished. It’s a mad scramble and for a moment or two Kent can’t get a decent grip on him, not really, until Chandler curls his fingers around either side of Kent’s waist and Kent can hold Chandler’s face in a way that’s supposed to be soothing. It doesn’t work, not really, because they’re biting, desperate, and Kent stumbles backwards before steadying himself.

‘You—you’re not _only_ anything,’ Chandler breathes, around his eager kisses. 

‘I—what? Never mind.’ 

Kent rakes his fingers through Chandler’s hair instead, just because he’s always wanted to, and presses back just as hard.

His ears are too full of his own blood to hear and Kent never imagined he’d have Chandler by the scruff of his collar, the back of his neck but here he is and Chandler complies when he presses his thumbs into the soft underside of his jaw to deepen the angle, as he encourages this half-torrid kissing. He catches Chandler’s lower lip and tugs it into the questionable harbour of his own mouth, and sucks hard until he’s distracted by Chandler’s hands on his arse.

He thinks of his scars for a fleeting moment, the raised, jagged lines that he knows are there, but he can’t be bothered worrying about them when Chandler’s kissing his neck hard, pressing his fingers into the small of his back. Chandler knows, he must know about them; he’s just never seen. None of them have. And Kent’s already forgotten why that matters. He’s not sure why anything matters, because this is Chandler pressed against him, those are his fingers wrapped around his hips, that’s his mouth pressed against his hammering pulse and nothing fucking matters anymore, nothing except this. 

Except everything does, too, and Kent knows that his clutching hands aren’t docile, that there’s still a savagery in him that he’s never liked but always kept.

Kent tightens his hold in Chandler’s hair. ‘You’re a bastard.’

Chandler doesn’t even try to nod. ‘I know.’

His voice is so reckless and raw that Kent’s willing to guess his brain short-circuits, because no matter how many times his brain has tried to approximate that sound in his fevered dreams it’s nothing on the way sound falls out of Chandler’s mouth now. He hauls him back towards him, the next kiss little more than a collision, aggressive and bruising, and Chandler presses back with an enthusiasm that makes Kent groan and drag his hands to the buttons of Chandler’s waistcoat.

‘D’you have to make it this difficult to get to you?’ he pants, having to break away to look what he’s doing, just for second.

Chandler opens his mouth in what might be a budding laugh but it never bears fruit; Kent kisses him again, twining their tongues, tugging at the knot of his tie. That he can do without looking, without thinking if what he just said means more than he’d initially thought, and once he’s got that free he switches attention to Chandler’s shirt, the buttons at his throat and wrists. Kent does his best to unbutton the cuffs, their hands close enough to be touching, fingers tangling in momentary holds, and just about manages to remember himself enough to deposit the cufflinks on the nearby sidetable.

Kent grabs Chandler by the hips, bullies him up against the bedroom door; he lays his mouth against the crook of Chandler’s jaw and the gasp he gets for his troubles is gorgeous. He’ll never forget that, nor the whimper that escapes him when Kent nips the bone, nor the way Chandler’s hands get more demanding as he slips them beneath Kent’s suit jacket, tugging at the shoulders.

He takes his hands off Chandler for the time it takes for him to shuck the offending item off, leaning into Chandler with the rest of his body instead to keep him still. He doesn’t pay attention to exactly where it goes, but he aims for a piece of furniture and Chandler doesn’t seem to mind. Not yet, anyway, but they’ll worry about that when the time comes and Kent doesn’t subdue his scrambling, eager hands, catching his fingers around Chandler’s belt until he palms the heat of him, presses, and swallows the low sound that comes out of Chandler’s mouth.

‘Can we—?’ Chandler asks, half-gasping as he swallows and fumbles with the buttons of Kent’s shirt. ‘I don’t think I’d get through—’ 

Leading him by the beltloops, Kent drags until Chandler’s off-centre, tipping into him until they’re aligned; they find the bed, find their way on to it, all skin as they somehow fumble out of the rest of their clothes. Kent had always thought that Chandler would still be fastidious, even in this, and so much so that even his subconscious couldn’t convince him not to do it in his dreams, but here he leaves his finery where it falls and for some reason he can’t quite comprehend Kent finds himself on top of Chandler, feeling Chandler’s chest expand with each laboured breath beneath him, shuddering at the way Chandler runs his hands along the line of his bare back.

He rolls his hips very deliberately and Chandler’s fingers tighten around his ribs; Kent wonders vaguely if they’re leaving bruises, if he’ll find them in the morning, and the thought alone’s enough to make his breathing come heavier, faster. Chandler swallows; Kent can’t help but follow the extension of his neck, the way he arches his head back. The invitation’s too much: he leans forwards and smears open-mouthed kisses down Chandler’s throat, pressing his mouth down the slope of Chandler’s chest, revelling in the way Chandler breathes hard through his nose and a low moan still escapes him eventually, as Kent flattens his tongue against Chandler’s sternum. Chandler’s hands find their way to the curve of Kent’s skull, on the firm side of gentle, and although Kent follows his urging he does so slowly, lingering until Chandler almost whines, pressing his nose to laved skin.

‘Could you just—’ Chandler flounders for a moment as Kent nestles flush against him, finding his balance. ‘—stay here?’

He curls his fingers around Kent’s skull where it slopes to meet his spine, through his hair, to underline his words; Kent only really understands when Chandler surges up to kiss him again, his mouth insistent, and when they part for a moment’s air he whispers an ‘Okay,’ that really shouldn’t feel as intimate as it sounds. 

Chandler crashes into him again, a man with a biting kiss and a firm grip on his waist, and Kent doesn’t even care as he finds himself on his side, slipping in the confusion, in the galaxy of Chandler’s mouth where their orientation doesn’t matter because the kissing doesn’t stop, not even when he’s on his back and arching up into Chandler’s warmth, pressing himself against Chandler’s hip with a whine and a tightening of fingers.

The last guy had sat back, knees bracketing Kent’s hips, and crooned, ‘Look at you,’ through the darkness. Kent had almost rolled his eyes and said that no, he can’t, it’s physically impossible from this angle, but the memory rushes from his head faster than it can arrive because Chandler’s not sitting back, Chandler’s weight is pressing him into the mattress and Chandler’s leaning to mouth at his racing pulse. And it’s the sight of him, _him_ above him, rosy with exertion, that makes Kent bite his lip, close his eyes, revel in the heat of his skin and submit to benediction of lips and tongue until he’s little more than a supplicant, grasping at Chandler’s shoulders. 

It’s sedition in the sheets, his back bowed upwards to meet Chandler’s chest. He’s everywhere all at once, coming apart under Chandler’s mouth, and if he ever thought he was in control then he’s so, so wrong, so fucking wrong. Chandler could ruin him and he wouldn’t care, make him forget his name, paint bruises across his neck where he can’t hide them and he’d ask him to do it again and again and again. He might as well enjoy his self-destruction at the fullest now that it’s begun and he hooks a leg around Chandler’s, presses up into him in a way that makes Chandler’s hips buck and Kent nip at his shoulder.

Chandler’s preoccupied with his mouth, his messy kisses; Kent would have had them both off by now, if he’d been thinking straight, but be that as it may he’s fascinated by Chandler’s tongue, the heat of his mouth, the fact that they’ve set aside technique for the night and they clash together desperately, teeth and tongue intermingling as Kent’s head’s pressed back into the pillow, as he scrapes his fingers across the spread of Chandler’s back.

‘God, for fuck’s sake,’ he says, gasping the words whenever he’s got the chance between swipes of Chandler’s tongue against his. In the end he has to get him by the scruff of his neck and hold him millimeters above his mouth, too close to really see. ‘Please.’

Kent knows he sounds wrecked. He has been for a while, this notwithstanding, but it’s the way Chandler’s panting, the way he doesn’t even care that he’s begging, pleading with him. Now isn’t the time for pride. Chandler nods; Kent doesn’t as much see the gesture but feels it as Chandler breathes hard against the crook of his shoulder, his cheek against the pounding of the pulse in Kent’s arched neck.

Chandler grasps with one hand at Kent’s hip, holding him still, quelling the desperate squirming that’s keeping them from alignment. A curse slips out of Kent’s mouth at the first brush, the first slide between them; he grasps for the back of Chandler’s neck with both hands, opening Chandler’s mouth again with his own. The rock of his hips steals all their breath away, and though they should pause to breathe they collide for another ill-advised kiss, a gasping wreck of a thing that ends with teeth in Chandler’s lip and a hiss that could have been from either of them.

‘There,’ he gasps, dragging his teeth over his lip as his grip digs into Chandler’s trapezius. ‘Like that.’

And Chandler does it again, with a groan and the precision that Kent’s long come to associate with him, and Kent keens a pitchy moan against his mouth as his hips stutter upwards, a visceral reaction. The only thought that occupies his mind anymore is that he needs to be closer, needs to press against and pull towards and gasp and arch and none of those are useful. The feeling of Chandler against him, panting and lost, is so incendiary that it makes Kent wonder if he’s got any finesse left, or if they ever had any.

It doesn’t seem to matter anymore, not with their hips rolling hard in a rhythm now they’ve found it. Kent wraps his legs around Chandler’s waist, locking his ankles together above the small of his back, and urges Chandler on with moans that whittle words down to mere vowels. A shudder runs through him as Chandler hides his face in the crook of Kent’s neck, the warm breaths the only evidence of Chandler murmuring something to him.

But he’s not listening, and it doesn’t matter because Chandler’s shifted his weight and moved a hand between them, wrapping his fingers around   them both. With the first stroke, Kent gasps and rasps out a ‘Yes,’ digging his fingers into Chandler’s back and dragging him back into a messy kiss, clutching at the back of his neck. Chandler moans and Kent presses hard into the lines of him, arching into his touch and his weight and biting at his lip hard when Chandler comes with a sharp sound, pressing the vibration into Kent’s too-hot neck.

Kent can’t tell if it’s that that does it, or the way Chandler pants into his skin, or the twist of his wrist, but he’s gone. He plummets, like Tennyson’s eagle, over the edge with a rush of feeling that makes everything go a little blurry around the edges, so indistinct that for a moment Kent feels as if the press of Chandler’s mouth against his own is borne of affection.

*

There’s barely a moment between Kent revelling in the way their limp limbs tangle and Chandler’s fingers wrapping around Kent’s arm, pulling the hold around his shoulders loose so that he can move away. Kent’s blissful enough for it not to immediately arouse any alarm in him, but when the flush abates and leaves him cold he raises himself up on unsteady elbows. His stomach sinks as the ensuite door clicks shut. He tries to fight away the sudden onslaught of dread—which is easier said than done with a still-muddled brain—and searches the immediate area until he spots a convenient box of tissues. He reaches out and gets on with cleaning himself up the best he can, given the circumstances, and yet the proactivity doesn’t quell the growing unease.

‘Oh, _fucking_ hell,’ Kent breathes, leaning his weight back onto Chandler’s pillows.

They shouldn’t have done this. Yet things can’t go backwards, and they have, and Kent’s still lying there on Chandler’s bed with the tissues balled in his tightened fist, trying to think of where they go from here. The feeling of his skin against someone else’s sheets isn’t new, and he knows the routine, yet (like many things) it doesn’t feel like it applies in Chandler’s flat. But he can’t tell what does, either, what his expectations might be, so he lies there for a moment longer, listening to the spray of water from the next room.

A creature of doubt growls against his bones, claws at the cage of his ribs. He doesn’t trust words anymore, he hasn’t for a while, and all of their actions suddenly seem opaque. He can’t make head nor tail of any of them, save for just a moment of certainty, brief but bone-deep, that his moment of importance has passed, that they’ll walk in to the station tomorrow morning with blank expressions and the usual distance. They’ve crossed the chasm and looped back, haven’t they? Chandler found out he’s been mad for him for years, he saw an opportunity to do something about the smoking, he fulfilled his week-long promise. Erica had called it a bribe; maybe Morgan was right. Maybe that is more him than he thinks.

Kent heaves himself into a sitting position, unwilling just to lie there and await whatever fate’s coming in his direction, but finds that it’s no better a position. Instead he scans the room and is glad to see things that are familiar, if incriminating; he tugs on his discarded boxers and feels marginally more in control of the situation. Then he notices the clean lines of all the furniture, the crisp expanse of the dark wardrobe doors and their crumpled garments over the recently hoovered carpet, and he loses all the momentary comfort.

He picks up a shirt and immediately he knows its not his; the texture’s wrong, too smooth and too expensive. Yet he’s still tempted to drape it around himself, too-wide shoulders be damned, shroud himself in Chandler’s smell. He’s weak for him in his bones, always has been, always will be. All the more reason not to do anything, then, and he only allows his fingers one or two passes over the collar before he hangs the material on the corner of an armchair he hadn’t noticed until now.

He hadn’t noticed much except Chandler, Chandler’s skin, Chandler’s mouth, and the last refuge of his brain that reminds him he’s a detective is almost ashamed at his negligence. He casts his eyes over the rest of the room, trying not to notices the specks that mark it out as Chandler’s—the book by the side of his bed, what looks like a glasses case, the glint of a tub of Tiger Balm—until he spots his own shirt. He rushes for it, hoping for some daft reason that it might offer some sort of consolation, but it doesn’t. He shrugs it on and the material almost chafes, compared to Chandler’s skin, so he squeezes his eyes shut and doesn’t bother doing up the line of buttons. Instead he ends up sat on the edge of Chandler’s bed, running a hand through his hair, wondering what the hell he’s supposed to do now.

He probably shouldn’t stay. Yet he can’t bring himself to get to his feet again, not while he’s so preoccupied about his mouth aching from being kissed, not when he can still feel each of Chandler’s fingers around the wing-flare of his hip. He’d probably wobble around, unsteady, if he got up again at this point. The successive realisations make him weak at the knees: that the smarting on his neck’s the result of a demanding mouth, that the spatter of water from the next room is proof he’s still not alone and isn’t about to be, that he’s sat on Chandler’s bed in his pants and, oh, _fuck_.

Kent knows he should go. You don’t shag your colleagues, not like that, and hang around for post-coital banter and the offer of tea before you go. He should just get dressed, pick up his things and leave, text Chandler something along the lines of _Forget it, we won’t mention it again_ on the way to the Tube station, but he can’t go because he doesn’t know how Chandler’s door locks and he can’t just not care, it doesn’t turn on and off like a tap and he already bloody knows that, why does everything have to fucking well remind him—

The door to the ensuite opens with a soft click; Kent keeps his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees. He daren’t look in case the tears that are threatening actually make an appearance, and if there’s one thing he’s not going to do tonight it’s cry in front of Chandler.

‘Emerson.’

Kent swallows down the choked feeling that’s been creeping up on him and says, ‘Sir.’

‘Please… don’t call me that.’ Chandler’s voice is soft, bruised. ‘Not like this.’

In that case he’s got no idea what to call him. He hadn’t even called him by any name when he was most likely to let his guard slip, let out a shameless gasp of _Joe_ , but even now that idea makes his skin crawl with embarrassment and he stares at his hands, the way his fingers are perfectly still.

‘All right.’

It’s not, not really, but Kent still manages to say it. Maybe it’s that success that makes him think it’s a good idea to turn and try to make some sort of eye contact.

Kent knows well enough already that Chandler makes wearing a good suit look like it’s the suit’s lucky day, but out of it he’s so different and so stunning that Kent almost thinks sitting there with his mouth open is an acceptable course of action. He’s beautiful—so much so that his thinking it feels inevitable. However many minutes have passed—and Kent doesn’t know how many, he’s temporarily lost that faculty along with several others—he still looks how he did hovering above Kent’s mouth, skin flushed and pleasingly warm, the colour back in his face. The edges of his hair are still damp, too; Kent wants to touch, feel him again, but he braces his hands against the edges of the once-perfectly-made bed instead and tries not to grip so hard as to give himself away. Though, in the next moment, he remembers he’s already done that by quite a margin, and releases the grip of his fingers to sigh and drag his hands across his face.

Chandler takes that as a sign that he should say something. Kent tries to listen, but his mind’s shouting over Chandler’s level tone and he can’t keep his mind on the words Chandler’s saying because he knows they’re empty. He’d offer up his own soliloquy, he’s performed it enough before, but his mouth is dry and Chandler’s different, he’s always been different. He can’t say it was wonderful while it lasted, because the rest of their relationship hasn’t been wonderful (no matter how brilliantly shagged out Kent feels now, running his tongue over a sore spot on the inside of his lip) and that’s something that goes with people who’ve had more than they have, who’ve got memories to look back on. Theirs has just been a series of moments, not a relationship. Culminating in this. Whatever this is.

‘I know,’ he says into the hush, the words trailing off into the sudden quietness. ‘It’s fine.’

‘What?’ Chandler’s words suddenly stop; he does honestly sound confused and Kent suspects that what he said didn’t align with the conversation at all. ‘What do you know?’

‘One fuck doesn’t make it all better.’

’Is that—is that what you think this is?’

What else could it be? Kent had hoped otherwise, and perhaps in the hazy aftermath of orgasm he’d thought that this was something to do with love, or at least affection. But he’s an expert in deluding himself and the truth’s staring him in the face. He can’t blame Chandler. He’s done this a hundred times; it’s a tried and true method of release, if you’d excuse the pun. And Kent knows Chandler couldn’t just go and out find a good-looking bloke; he’s not the sort of man who’s relaxed around strangers. It has to be someone he knows, someone he trusts, someone who doesn’t need his explanations. Kent’s the perfect candidate. And, maybe, at one point he would have been happy with just this.

Chandler moves to sit beside him on the bed. Kent feels remarkably bare next to him, although Chandler’s torso is skin and beautiful bones and muscle. Kent knows he’ll never have enough time to touch him, to hold—and that he probably won’t have the chance again. Chandler’s breathing betrays his whirring thoughts. Kent’s sat with him for so long that he knows, he knows his mind and he wishes he understood it. Except Chandler suddenly turns towards him—bodily turns towards him, one leg hitched up onto the mattress, not just his head—and he reaches to lay a cupped hand along the slope where Kent’s neck meets his shoulder.

Kent can’t help it: he shrugs away the touch automatically, his brain unable to contemplate that the soft, gentle touch is the same as the one that grasped at him, that wrung moans from his throat and never will again.

Chandler retreats without being asked, folding his hands in the vee created by his legs. ‘I don’t do this sort of thing lightly.’

‘I know.’

You can still put a lot of thought into your fuck-buddies, your one night stands, your conjugal visits.

‘The inside of my head isn’t a very spacious place,’ Chandler continues, pleating the bed sheet into little folds. Kent watches his fingers; he’s never seen him worry anything before. ‘There isn’t any room to breathe.’

Kent knows that feeling, though perhaps not to the extent that Chandler means. He looks away for a moment, running his fingers over his swollen lip, staring until the lamplight sears his eyes and he looks back to Chandler because, still, he feels like the only familiar thing in the room.

‘Sometimes… sometimes I need everything to be louder. Louder than my mind.’

Kent finds himself saying, ‘I’m happy to have been of service,’ in a tone that’s much harder than he feels.

‘No, no,’ Chandler fumbles around the words and his hand lands on Kent’s wrist. ‘That’s not what I meant.’ He must will Kent to look him in the eye, because for some godforsaken reason he’s drawn to do just that, and Chandler offers up a small, grim smile. ‘I’ve been known to talk myself out of things I want.’

Kent wonders if perhaps, in this case, that might not have been better. Chandler hates mess, he hates everything being strewn about and out of place and that’s all they could be, really. A mess. They already are at work, and now here they sit, Kent having only perfunctorily picked up the clothes they’d dropped in the haste, in the heat. He probably still smells more like sweat and sex and Chandler’s mouth than himself and Chandler is warm water and soap.

‘So, sometimes,’ Chandler continues, careful in the silence, running his thumb back and forth over Kent’s knuckles. ‘I push. To make sure I don’t back down. Because I don’t want to, not really.’

‘You didn’t push me into anything.’

It seems important to say that, even when no other words really want to come out of his mouth, and Kent looks up suddenly to find Chandler’s done the same. 

‘That’s—I’m glad.’ He smiles then, a little, but it wavers at the edges. ‘What I meant is that I push myself.’

‘I know you do.’

And there’s something soft in _those_ words, something that creaks in Kent’s chest as he admits to noticing, to worrying. He admits to everything. Kent pulls his wrist away from Chandler’s fingers because the gentle touch is suddenly pressure, encircling and too much. There’s no chase that follows, none of touchy insistence that he’s used to; Chandler just watches the side of his head, Kent swears he can feel his gaze, and gives a weak nod. Then he hangs his head, the line of his neck warm in the low light, and Kent lets himself study the slope of his spine.

‘I didn’t ask you here just so we could fuck,’ Chandler tells him in a deadly-soft hush. 

The word sounds wrong in Chandler’s mouth, laid out in his voice. He’s not confident in the terminology and it shows. Kent wants to gather him close and stroke the back of his head, the spread of his shoulders and tell him that it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t need these words from him. But he can’t, because he does need them.

‘I—well, I don’t know what I thought, exactly,’ Chandler continues, gaze still on the comforter instead of Kent’s eyes. ‘I don’t think I really thought we would get this far.’

‘We did, though.’

‘Yes. We did.’ There’s a path of redness across Chandler’s collarbone that proves that. ‘I’ve never—’

‘You’ve done that before.’

‘Yes.’ Chandler swallows as if that’s an admittance, as if it matters to either of them. ‘But not in a long time. Not with anyone who means as much to me.’

Kent’s throat tightens again. ‘Don’t say things you don’t mean.’

‘Emerson.’ There’s hurt in Chandler’s voice and something splinters in Kent’s heart. ‘Look at me.’

He does. He still can’t resist doing something that Chandler’s asked him to do, although when he meets his gaze again there’s nothing like the usual determination in his eyes. Kent almost flounders at that alone, because if that’s happened there’s something wrong, but it’s not the slight fear that had crowded in on his look in the station. Kent can’t tell what it is, exactly, but he knows it’s there, and it compels him a little closer. Chandler isn’t the man from the station, not like this, and yet he is; there’s something of both of those men in his expression, the set of his shoulders.

And, despite what’s probably best for him, Kent trusts him. Whichever him he is. He knows enough of dichotomy to be on firm enough footing.

Chandler studies him with a gentle expression. ‘Am I the sort of man who’d do this for no reason?’

‘I don’t know.’ Kent tells the truth, because it’s the last refuge he’s got now. ‘And it’s like I said. People have sex for all sorts of reasons.’

‘I’m afraid my reason’s one of the more straightforward ones.’

Kent’s ready to say that no matter what Chandler thinks, that still leaves room for a reason that he doesn’t want to hear, but he’s quieted by Chandler raising an arm to brush his fingers against Kent’s face, the broad blade of his palm cupping Kent’s jaw. Satiation must bring a gentleness to his caresses because this is a world away from the way he’d gripped Kent’s hips, his waist, but there’s something nervous in his eyes _._ He leans forward, grazing his nose against Kent’s, then stops as if he’d meant to kiss him but he’s thought better of it.

Kent looks at him, his slight smile saddened at the edges. ‘Bit stuck now, aren’t you?’

Chandler’s small laugh is a small victory. His eyes flick down towards Kent’s mouth for a split second, then he murmurs, ‘I’m where I want to be.’

This time Kent crumbles into this kiss, this depth of softness; Chandler’s mouth is light and pliable, a question instead of a demand this time, and Kent answers in the only way he knows how, with the only answer he’d ever give this man.

Kent’s hands shake, badly, mostly for fear of fucking it up and Chandler grasps at them blindly, his own long fingers trembling as he murmurs, ‘Hey, you’re all right,’ between kisses. Kent would say, no, he’s not, this is bloody mental and he feels a bit wonky, like he’s had too much to drink, except he doesn’t ever want to stop doing this and instead he extricates a hand to cup Chandler’s jaw in order to bring him closer, nearer, deeper; he shivers when he feels thumbs stroking up his sides under his shirt.

The particulars of his fine touch are apparent now, in the quiet and the slow; Kent gives a soft moan as they find a particularly nice angle. Chandler smiles against him and tugs a little, urging him closer against his side, and Kent goes. It’s not an answer, and Kent wants one of those at some point tonight, but as Kent slides his hands around to cradle the back of Chandler’s neck he reckons he probably understands. He knows Chandler’s shit at talking, especially when it’s talking about things that have to do with the inside of his head. The skipper whinges on about it enough.

Chandler can kiss like a half-tamed creature, still shy of the bridle, and Kent can still feel the press of those touches on his mouth as Chandler places slow, open-mouthed kisses on Kent’s shoulder, loosening the collar of his unbuttoned shirt. Kent lets him, tilts his neck even though he doesn’t consciously choose to, his fingers still curved around the back of Chandler’s neck, feeling the muscle and bone shift.

‘I rely on implication and I shouldn’t because this is where it gets me,’ Chandler says, after a moment’s breath, his forehead resting against the cap of Kent’s shoulder. ‘I wanted you to know but I couldn’t just… tell you.’

Kent brings Chandler’s head up again, his hands on either side of his cheekbones and rolls another kiss against his mouth.

‘I know what you mean,’ he murmurs against Chandler’s parted lips, because he does know, and not only in the context of their history. 

He runs his hands over Chandler’s shoulders and feels the man relax a little into his touch, breathe out as if something between them’s been broken and reset, settled into a new frequency. Maybe it has, Kent doesn’t know and can’t tell yet, but all of a sudden he feels as if they’re nothing more than the blood in their veins, the air in their lungs, and none of those things have memories. They just are, and Chandler’s lifting his head for no reason other than to look at him, so Kent sits there with hands warmed on Chandler’s skin, and feels everything he’s been masking for the best part of three years. 

‘Do you have to go?’ Chandler asks, his voice a hoarse whisper.

Kent shakes his head, and Chandler insists on another kiss; Kent meets the touch as if it’s already a habit, or an addiction he forgot.

*

A milky-grey dawn blooms through the rain outside, and Chandler’s stretched on the bed beside him like a sleeping lion.

Kent had woken once or twice in the night, bleary and confused about the unfamiliar stretch of light across the wall, to find Chandler’s arm slung around his waist and his breaths deep and easy against his neck. One time he’d been stiflingly hot, each place where Chandler’s skin met his searing as they lay together in the velvet dark, and for a moment or two he’d actually considered slithering out of bed to open a window, let some winter air in, just for a moment. But he’s just about settled on the idea and braced himself for fiddling with an unfamiliar latch when Chandler snuffles behind him, presses his nose to the back of Kent’s neck, and tightens his grip on his middle like it’s a reflex. He’s not awake, Kent knows, he’d memorised the sleep-rhythm of his relaxed breathing almost as soon as they’d laid themselves down. Even so, he’d stayed put and settled for sticking a foot out from underneath the duvet. He could feel the thump of Chandler’s heart where it had been pressed against his spine, and he wasn’t going to give that up for the world.

At some point they must have rolled apart; Chandler’s facing away from Kent as the slight morning light pools around them, the duvet tucked under his arm, and if it didn’t risk waking him Kent would give in to the urge to splay his fingers over the jut of his shoulder blade, to realign himself with the faded red marks he left last night.

He knows things about Chandler now that he’d never thought he would, like that he was born on a Wednesday in winter and he’s a mess of recessive traits, blond and blue-eyed and unable to roll his tongue. He knows his night pupils, what his eyes look like dark. He knows that Chandler bruises surprisingly easily—he also knows to keep that in mind, in future. He’d discovered quite early on that Chandler really is quite keen on kissing, and that he somehow manages to look just as tall lying down as he does standing up, which Kent thinks is a bloody miracle and Chandler thinks is a bemusing sort of thing to notice. He knows that Chandler’s got a faint scar on his jaw that Kent’s never caught sight of before, though he won’t forget it now, because Chandler shivers if he runs his thumb across it.

Some things are still the same. He’s still terribly easy to embarrass. In the hour around midnight Chandler had said ‘Emerson,’ then Kent had said, ‘Em.’ Just as a slight correction, with the justification, ‘Emerson’s a mouthful.’ Then the back of Chandler’s neck had gone very pink and Kent had tugged him back into bed, pressing smiling kisses to the flush. When he’d wondered aloud about what Mansell must have said about him to make such an impression, Chandler had clammed up with such a sheepish expression that Kent didn’t care that the most he could get out of him was that it had something to do with ‘under his desk’ and ‘after hours.’ 

Kent had traced the bridge of Chandler’s nose in bed, gazing at him through the dark and the veil of relaxation; he somehow looked older and younger at the same time. Older than when they first met, more lines around his eyes, yet there’s something a little younger in the softening of his expression and the way he nudges their mouths together for a soft, tentative kiss. With an expression like that he hadn’t looked like he could find his way out of a clearly numbered dot-to-dot puzzle, never mind head a murder investigation.

Yet, that’s what he does, and despite all the world-changing and axis-shifting they’ve been doing overnight, there’s still a day’s police work ahead of them. Nothing changes that, not even them being cosseted in the same sheets. It won’t be the first time in history that this has happened, after all, and the thin blue line hasn’t suddenly gone dotted.

Kent’s curled into a question mark in bed, facing the long line of Chandler’s back, the blunt heaviness of him now, against these sheets, when he’s usually the epitome of grace and precision. He should probably wake him, because he’s somehow got to get back to his own flat before returning to the station, but he can’t quite bring himself to. Chandler seems calm like this. Soothed. It’s probably ridiculous, it’s probably counterproductive, but Kent’s had enough experience with that when it comes to Chandler, so he just lies next to him and listens to him breathe.

It’s the little things that he craves, after all.

His phone beeps and he swears vehemently in his head, turning over and reaching towards the side table. It’s only Jack— _Your sister rang, call her back, FFS_ —and if it’s that entirely unnecessary message that brings this moment to an end, then Kent’s going to wring his flatmate’s neck. Or make him take the bins out for a week. Whichever seems to strike more fear in his heart—probably the bins, all things considered.

But Chandler doesn’t move, Kent dares to breathe again, and the phone in his hand remains silent. The other outstanding messages burn through the gentle light, reminding him of the sleep-riddled moments when he’d blinked his way out of unconsciousness only far enough to know that his phone’s making a sound and he ought to stop it. Then Erica’s name had popped up on the screen not once, but twice, and he’d have panicked if he wasn’t half-asleep.

_From: Erica Kent, 1:07  
_ _Wanker._

_From: Erica Kent, 1:09  
_ _You said you’d ring & tell me what’s going on._

He might have tried replying, but his other hand had been tangled with Chandler’s at the time. She must have noticed that he’d checked his messages, though, because the tone of the subsequent texts changes to something that’s so smug she doesn’t even have to be there for Kent to hear it.

_From: Erica Kent, 1:52  
_ _You know when I get off work._

_From: Erica Kent, 1:55  
_ _I promise not to say I told you so. ;)_

She’ll say it, of course she will. She’s never been able to resist. But that’s hours away, this evening after the shift, and he doesn’t have to think about it now. He doesn’t have to think anything now apart from what a wonder it is to find himself here, in Chandler’s flat in the early morning, invited and comfortable. The last wisps of smoke that may have clung to his skin washed away with the scent of Chandler’s soap. Kent sighs at the thought, returns his phone to the bedside table and rolls back onto his side, happy just to wait and watch as Chandler gently stirs.

Chandler rolls over, slow and ungainly, blindly pushing the pillow into a more comfortable shape. Kent watches, his gaze soft as water in case he might wake him, until Chandler opens his eyes, blinks once or twice to chase away the sleep, and bloody well smiles.

‘You’re still here,’ he says, voice gravelly in a different way this time, as if after all last night revealed he expected Kent to have fled back home when he wasn’t looking.

Kent nods. He is still here. He’d stay here forever if Chandler wanted him to, right here, in this bed, in this flat. Granted, one of them would probably have to go out for food once in a while, but apart from that, he’d stay. The smile fades slowly, almost as if Chandler’s just realised he’d usually be embarrassed at such a performance. Kent wonders if he should say something, a reassurance or a joke, perhaps, or mention that’s there’s a shift on in two hours and they’re expected, but he settles on saying nothing.

Minutes pass in idle touches and tandem breathing until Kent reaches over to Chandler and smooths his hair back with gentle fingers where it’s fallen over his forehead in sleep. Kent doesn’t want to think about his own but Chandler smiles again, a little firmer this time, and reaches out to tangle his fingers in the curls, to coax him closer. They don’t kiss; they don’t need to, strictly speaking, and Kent thinks they probably had their fill last night. That, or they both know that if they started now they’d end up half an hour late for the shift with ruddied mouths and mild stubbleburn. The thought brings the quirk of a smile to Kent’s mouth and he doesn’t miss how Chandler’s hazy gaze catches on the movement.

Chandler runs his bed-warm fingertips across Kent’s jaw, rubbing gently at the joint as he lets his fingers catch at the nape of Kent’s neck. 

‘D’you want your cigarettes back?’ he asks. 

Kent almost frowns. That’s not the question he’d been expecting this morning, but Chandler lets his hand trail across Kent’s skin, across his chin, and Kent’s distracted enough to answer.

‘You’re welcome to them, if you want,’ Kent says, just as Chandler traces his thumb along his lips.

‘I might take to carrying them around.’ Chandler keeps a surprisingly straight face and quirks a brow. ‘They can be useful, apparently.’ 

The repetition startles a laugh out of Kent. He smiles at nothing but the closeness, the sheer improbability of them being here, like this, right now; Chandler runs his gentle touch across Kent’s bottom lip again and Kent presses the tip of his tongue in a little kitten-lick against the pad of Chandler’s thumb. It’s only an experiment, something he’d pondered when he’d been somewhere between consciousness and sleep, easy enough to do and even easier to deny. But there’s no need, because Chandler’s breath catches in his throat, the movement’s interrupted, and Kent already knows how to read that look.

Yup. Chandler’s definitely got a thing about his mouth. Kent’s already got a few ideas about how to put that knowledge to use, and—perhaps fiendishly—he can’t wait to let it slip to Mansell that of the two of them, he’s not the one with an oral fixation. 

‘I thought I was supposed to be packing it in, anyway,’ he says, smiling at little at Chandler’s distant expression.

‘It’s your choice.’

‘And here I was, thinking I’d already made it.’ Kent nudges Chandler’s fingers, pressing a kiss to his palm; Chandler might have made himself say that this morning, but Kent knows that last night’s sentiments are inescapable. He made his choice a week ago. ‘Between you kissing me and the cigarettes, you win out, every time.’

It’s not a lie. Kent’s kicked the habit for lesser things before. It’d just been intermittent, a chronic case of on-and-off compulsion, and now there are better things he’d like to do with his mouth. Things that occupied more of his brainspace than the cigarettes ever did when he was off them. He almost doesn’t know where to start now.

Chandler looks surprised, almost nonplussed. ‘I’m glad.’

‘You should be. That was my attempt at blatant flattery.’

‘No, I mean…’ Chandler trails off, glances down; the back of his neck’s going pink again. ‘I’m glad you stopped. And started.’

Chandler sounds as if he’s trying to articulate a thousand things at once. Kent reckons it’s probably a little early in the day for trying to do that, and perhaps they should give this talking about themselves and their feelings and _them_ another go once they’ve got a cup of coffee down them. But maybe all those words run through his head because Chandler’s voice is quiet, so far from the commanding tone from the front of the incident room, that it’s all he can do to hold his gaze.

‘Funny how things work out.’

It’s the only thing Kent can think to say, although he’s never been able to decide if he believes in fate or if he’s just particularly susceptible to existential flu. It’s a hollow sentiment, because this isn’t funny, this isn’t quaint, and they both made this decision knowing that the consequences will be far-reaching. Nothing about it is coincidental. Yet Kent knows it’s not that part of it that makes Chandler’s face fall slightly, and he can’t have that, so he scrambles to think of ways to make what he’s felt all morning clear, how to get that contentment into words. Chandler’s hand has stilled against his neck but Kent reaches out and snares him by the waist. Chandler doesn’t smile, not yet, but his expression gentles.

‘But yeah.’ Kent strokes a hand against Chandler’s side, rubbing his thumb in comforting circles against his ribs. ‘Me too.’ 

Outside, the day is still cold and grey, the pavements wet. And yet the time that stretches before them no longer feels dismal, and there’s a burgeoning smile on Chandler’s face that makes up for the weather.

‘D’you want something to eat?’ he asks, voice surer now.

‘I could go for some cold toast.’ 

‘Sorry,’ Chandler says, easing himself up onto an elbow. ’Did you just say cold toast?’ 

‘It’s dead easy.’ Kent quirks a smile, slow with lingering sleep. ‘Stick some bread in a toaster and forget about it.’ 

Chandler’s mouth curves into a smile at that, and he shakes his head; Kent can feel the almost-laughter under his hand. Kent looks up at him, warm and happy for once, and half-wishes that he wasn’t also being practical. Because as much as he’d like to skive off work, ring up with a put-on cough and a stuffy nose and just spend all day looking at Chandler without glancing away every two minutes, he has a feeling that Chandler wouldn’t go along with that. So he’s somehow got to get up and avoid being distracted by Chandler, text _Keep your hat on_ to Erica on his way to the station, get back to his flat, avoid Jack’s usual needling about a night out ending after the sun’s come up, and arrive at the station with the rest of them being none the wiser. And there’s not really enough time.

But there’s never really enough time in the mornings, and as usual he’s planning for the worst case scenario. Cold toast can be eaten while en route, no matter the temperature outside, and he can shower while it cools. Erica would be thrilled at his sudden pragmatism.

After a moment Chandler sits up properly, runs a hand over his face, and looks back over his shoulder at Kent. ‘I think I can manage that.’ 

‘Course you can,’ Kent says quickly, lifting a hand to stroke at the line of Chandler’s spine. He both initiates the touch and speaks without thinking, and as he trails his fingertips against Chandler’s bed-warmed skin, he finds himself repeating, ‘Course you can,’ softer and somehow assured.

Chandler shivers, but he’s hiding a smile that somehow, in some miraculous twist of fate, Kent can share.

So he does. 

Kent never thought it’d be that easy—there’s nothing in his life that’s been easy, and apparently nothing in Chandler’s, either—but as he sits up and presses a brief kiss to the cap of Chandler’s shoulder, he realises that it actually just might be. If he lets it. And that, of all things, might not be as difficult as he thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here we are at the end, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the conclusion and that the weekend treats you well. Thank you so, so much for all the comments, kudos and support—this fandom truly is one of the loveliest. 
> 
> I can be found between fics on [Tumblr](http://saizine.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/saizine), both of which have their own ways of updating you on where I am with my current projects. Feel free to drop by, even ask questions if you fancy! I’m always glad to be pestered if it furthers my procrastination attempts… ;)


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